Descriptiveness

I've just finished reading a lovely story on the New Yorker online by Yiyun Li, called "Alone". It's bleak and seems like it's going to be a depressing story but then it isn't, it's just full of emotional content, which is the best thing for a short story to be, in my opinion.

It did, however, have a quality that a lot of short stories that I've read recently (I've been reading a lot of them (mostly in Canadian lit quarterlies, but also in collections and online). It's something I might not have noticed if I weren't also writing fiction in an active way at the moment, which makes me read with a detective's eye in addition to my usual desire to appreciate.

Walter took her to a café at the back of a gift shop. Apart from an idle man halfheartedly flipping through a book of local attractions, there was no one in the front of the shop, where miniature carved boats and model fish aged unwanted on the shelves. At the back of the shop, dim but for a single lamp hanging from the ceiling, there were a few unvarnished wooden tables. An old man at the counter nodded in greeting when he saw Walter. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the best time for those in the mountains to revel in the joys of hiking and fishing before the sunshine thinned to dusk, but in the shop time seemed to be stranded, day taking forever to turn into night. The browser picked up a snow globe and shook it; when his cell phone beeped he perked up and left abruptly.

It's well enough written and it's in keeping thematically - there's a lot of water in the story. But while the rest of the piece is gripping and unique, this whole paragraph seems meandering and also dull. The store isn't important enough to warrant this much attention. Even the caf/ is not particulary important. And that would be fine if the description was amazing and gave you not only a feeling of context but also that you were reading something that made you visualize in a way that you don't often, but the carved boats and model fish don't do that for me at all. I'm getting worked up about it not because I mind an average-quality paragraph in a great short story, but because I feel like the reason it's there is that there's an unnecessary emphasis in establishment short-story writing on lengthy description of surroundings. I'm guessing I'm in a minority in disliking this descriptiveness in itself, but I can't help it.

Some of it gets much much more distracting, like this passage in an excerpt from the memoir Happy, by Alex Lemon, published in a recent issue of Tin House (vol. 11 number 1 to be exact), wherein the protagonist teenage boy's brain surgery, for which his family has had to travel to Miami by plane, might be canceled because of a hurricane:

Ma and I walk the vacant streets. Yoo-hoo-colored water fills the ditches, and trash grips the fences. An empty Coca-Cola can tinkles across the sidewalk.

Independently, nothing is wrong with these sentences. But now I'm thinking about bottled beverages. Is that what we want? It can't be unintentional, can it? It really bugs me. The Yoo-hoo is fine, that actually is kind of a useful description, but then the coke can is in there just to be descriptively thorough, and isn't in any way helpful to me in creating the image, and, more importantly, totally jarred me out of my reading flow.

As I'm thinking about this I'm more and more thinking almost everyone would disagree with me (at least on the theory, if not on the coke can). Maybe it's a weakness in me. I skipped the descriptive passages in my first reading of The Hobbit (I was seven; I think I also skipped most of the songs). Incidentally, my dislike of Tolkien's mountain descriptions made me love The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I haven't read or even seen a copy of this book since I was maybe twelve so I'm not sure I should vouch for it this long after (I'm so often disappointed when I go back and read things I loved fifteen years ago), but at the time I thought it had a perfect way of dealing with descriptions - they're edited out of the new version of an older volume (which at the time I thought was real but have since decided was fictional; I'd really like to re-read that book).