When writing with detail becomes pointless and absurd

A rule of good writing, taught in every college writing seminar: write with specific details. But let's add something to that dictum: relevant details, telling details. A.S. Byatt overwhelms us, in the "The Children's Book," with irrelevant details, bits of coloration that reveal nothing about the characters, the plot, the historical moment, or the milieu. You could take a paragraph out of almost any chapter - let's say the premier of Olive's play Tom Underground, and read it and it's almost ludicrous: she goes on for paragraphs about what everyone in the vast audience is wearing. You think it'll never stop. It's killing the story, it doesn't matter at all what color crepe or wrap or whatever! Someone carries a bouquet of flowers. Isn't it enough to call them flowers? No? Okay, how about roses? No, we have to get the name of every flower: roses and lilies and something else I've never heard of and you haven't either unless you're a botanist. Some writers are great because the break convention in a bold and tremendous way - in thunder. Is every detail in Ulysses necessary? No - but every one contributes to our sense of that exact day in Dublin history. Is every detail in Moby-Dick necessary? Of course not - but the obsession with whaling arcana makes the book strange and wonderful. Byatt doesn't have that kind of obsession - she doodles on the margins, a showoff. Maybe she's trying to be a grand novelist - 900 pages! - but the other grand novelists whom she seems to emulate - Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - the 19th-century giants - keep us enthralled because of their sense of the dramatic, which Byatt either lacks or disdains.