Maud posted a small portion of Robert Birnbaum's interview of Charles Baxter during which Baxter says:

"I’ve written an essay about how most writers now don’t describe faces anymore, either as an index to character in the way the 19th-century novelists tended to do, or as a dramatic inflexion. You are more likely to get descriptions of clothes or body language than you are of faces. I just wanted to ask myself why."

It might be because, as James Salter once wrote, "great faces cannot be explained."