Thanks, @jannert, for that Wolf Hall extract. I love seeing real live prize-winning writers violate some perceived conventions in favor of their own style, and succeed. I keep remembering people saying, "You can't get fiction published in America if it has semicolons in it." I just glanced at the first couple of pages of the short story in the current issue of the New Yorker, and semicolons and colons abound. The conventional wisdom is often not wisdom at all.
I'm FOR breaking grammar rules to achieve a desired effect. I'm not for breaking grammar rules randomly or too make your reader hate you. So, yeah, if the same grammar rule gets repeatedly, deliberately, and pointlessly violated to the point that it disrupts the reader's calm, something is wrong.
I'm confused. You say that there's a sentence fragment in this example, but do I correctly understand that later you say that there isn't? (I certainly don't see one.) Is this example still an example? Edited to add: But in any case, the examples and issues that you've mentioned so far seem to me to be well within the flexibility permitted in fiction writing.
