Everything in this chapter is an instrument for noticing. None of it is a rule.
The evidence for that claim is in the chapter itself. Pride and Prejudice fails the character test; The Stranger and The Remains of the Day fail the momentum test; Bleak House fails almost every prohibition in §8 and remains one of the great openings in English; Beloved withholds more aggressively than any draft a workshop would tolerate. A model that rules these out has not identified a defect in them — it has identified its own limits.
What the model does reliably is convert a vague dissatisfaction into a specific question. This opening isn’t working becomes: the voice contract is undischarged, or there are eight promises here and I keep two, or this is a Panorama and the material wants to be a Rupture. Specific questions can be answered. Vague ones can only be worried at.
The deepest reason the opening pages resist formula is that their real subject is trust, and trust is not produced by the presence of correct features. It is produced by the reader’s growing sense that someone is in control of this — that the details are chosen, that the withholdings are deliberate, that the voice knows what it is doing. Every contract in §4 is, at bottom, a different way for a reader to detect competence and intention in the first two pages of a stranger’s book.
Which suggests the last and least mechanical test, to be applied after the other ten:
Does this page sound like someone who knows what they are doing?
If it does, a reader will forgive nearly everything else, and go on to page three.