The problem with his simply telling you things is that they have no context. It's stodgy, omnipresent narration. Rather than let characters develop, he drops facts on them like little bombs. It may as well be a shopping list of handy character facts. A man is fat. Pigs are pink. A woman is tall. Why at the point of a doctor appearing in the doorway do I need to know she has the assertive gait of a athlete?
So you can picture the scene in your mind's eye.
That, and the fact that she has penetrating eyes, is just a way of getting across that she's a strong, assertive, strident, woman - not a mousey, dithering or gormless type of nurse.
It's probably so you can picture yourself as the bloke who's ill - to get across that he probably quickly thinks "ooh bloody hell, she looks like she means business" rather than "oh god, not 'er again."
and by
gazing into those eyes if they [have] witnessed a profundity of experience rarely encountered by a person [their] age
he's not literally describing how she looks. He's saying that, unbeknownst to the guy in bed, as a matter of fact, she actually HAS see things rarely seen by a person her age. In other words, he's in a hospital in probably a very rough area, where people come in in all sorts of states. By the fact that she looks ever so slightly aghast, but strident with it, he can't help wondering whether this is the case. It's describing it from his perspective again, remember.
See - I obviously understand Dan Brown books better than you - you obviously just don't understand it.
I see what you mean about it being metaphors, now - it still makes sense literally, but the intended meaning is on a slightly different level, so I suppose that makes it a metaphor really.
You can get all that from a
penetrating stare? I'm impressed. See, you are using your imagination. Admittedly, by that point I already knew that she was in serious danger of becoming the standard subservient female character, who is about to spend the remainder of books being dragged across page after page in the hero's wake, who will undoubtedly be placed in peril at some point, but fear not, she'll be united with the hero at the end, as he undoubtedly foils some nefarious plot laid by international terrorists / the Vatican / Illuminati / Knights Templar / clowns (delete as a appropriate, but if it's clowns I may have to re-start reading). That's why it's so unremittingly dull. OK, I'll eat my words if she takes a hollow-point in the back of the head a few pages after I gave up, and Langdon instead takes up with a team of dwarves on the run from their indenture on a evil travelling circus (see, I'm working that clown angle already, so pay attention Danny-boy, this is how it's done).
I can't bring myself to care. She's not actually a character. Langdon's not actually a character either, no matter how often DB tells us about his 'Harris Tweeds' (he's an academic, see?). Characters have substance. They have a history. They have aspirations. They have foibles, strengths, and weaknesses. Things we can understand because we have them too. Good characters create a strand of empathy between you and them. You might not like them, but you want to know what happens to them next. The author has made you care. It doesn't have to be fantastic, poetic writing to achieve this. It doesn't actually need acres of metaphor, endless similes, allusion, but they can help illuminate the story (they can also clutter). It does require some effort to create a character that someone can care about though. That, I suppose, is why I felt
Inferno was such an enormous battleship of a turd. Had he perhaps tried to do something different, told a different story, he might have got away with the cardboard characters, and that tortured, clichéd prose. Perhaps it is a different story, but hey, I'm thinking not. If you want an assignment, go away and read it, and report back here once you are finished. I will humbly make yet another apology, nay, a plea for forgiveness from the YACF masses should I be wrong and there really is a clown-related adventure.
I'm still not going to forgive phrases like
profundity of experience though. And it's full of them. I bet there's plenty of
italics too, as he ladles out steaming plot mess. I didn't get that far.