“Paradoxically, vividness of description and detail here comes at the expense of realism. To put it simply, no one besides a writer—a professional noticer—notices this much, and certainly not in a near instantaneous time frame; not in a “taking in.” There is no reason to. This style of writing, which I admittedly enjoy and admire, is less interested in creating narrative “reality” than it is in creating an aesthetic experience—detail as art for its own sake.”