Detail v Telling Detail: Why The Children's Book is too long

When the characters in A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" head off to a daylong meeting on women's suffrage, you just know that you will hear a full account not only of the event but of each of the five lectures (not to mention what everyone was wearing - down t the patterns on the dresses, and not just flowers, but which variety of flower). This is too much! I know writers are praised for attention to detail, but let us add a qualifier here: telling detail. Detail that matters to plot, character, mood, setting, not detail just because the author is able to conjure up. No writer has more detail than Proust or Joyce, but theirs are evocative, all the time. No writer includes more arcana than Melville (Moby-Dick) but his is all leading toward one goal, an intense examination of a particular lost industry and art. No writer includes a broader scope of material than Tolstoy, but - even though his greatest fans concede that he lets War and Peace at times become a personal tirade - the story remains clearly focused on the lives and struggles of a few main characters. Byatt (or her editors, or her fawning critics - not the NYTBR reviewer, however, who qualified her praise) can learn a lesson from these great writers. Great fiction is not about overwhelming your readers with your own cpious intelligence. Didn't Hemingway say you have to kill your darlings? Byatt needs to massacre them - this is a 650-page book that should be half the length at most. And BTW, I am at a point where she begins to interpret a story of a girl playing with a dollhouse who is in fact a doll being played with by a larger girl. Wasn't this a Twilight Zone episode? Come on - copious imagination is one thing but ripoffs are something else.