I agree that that's what the book does. But it never made me care about the individual it was tracking, and that ruined everything else. If I don't care about the main character or the person he's talking to, why do I care about the conversation? Even more, why do I care about the exhaustive details of the route they walked while they were having the conversation?

The main character gives his (and Joyce's?) theory of art: art should not create any response in the viewer. If it does, it mars the purity of the art. Joyce may be a great author; he certainly succeeded in writing a book that created no response whatsoever in me (other than annoyance at the time I wasted plowing through the tedium of something that I didn't care about whatsoever). That may be great art, but I don't have to like it.