Why I'm putting aside The Stories of Alice Adams

I'm about 40% (250 pp) along in The Stories of Alice Adams (posthumously published by Knopf, 2002) and will return it to the library today - not because the stories are bad but because they are good. Yet they are good within a very narrow range - pretty much centered on the same kind of characters (the professional class living in the Bay Area from what I'd say is the 50s through the 890s? - with their defining characteristic being infidelity - almost every story involves at least one broken marriage), unadorned in style, not in the least experimental, but just within the worthy tradition of naturalism in fiction, a style championed by the New Yorker at least until the end of the century. But that said I feel it does the stories a disservice to read them (53 in this collection) straight through - what should feel fresh and insightful begins to feel repetitious and overdone. So I may return to this volume later, but have read enough for now (and thanks a lot Knopf for providing these stories with no context whatsoever; would it have killed you to at least indicate the date of publication?). No, AA does not rise to the level of her NYer successors such as Alice Munro, William Trevor, or Tessa Hadley; AA does a great job setting up the stories, sketching in character background, building the narrative through action and dialog, but she is much weaker at concluding these stories, which rarely if ever conclude with a gut-punch or an a-ha moment. For ex., the 3 stories I read yesterday: One (At the Beach) concerns a handsome elderly couple at a Mexican resort; during their stay the woman has what seems like an appendix attack; dr. comes, proscribes some Rx., end of story. In another (Truth or Consequences - nice title!) a woman reads news item one a guy she knew back in h.s. marrying a celebrity - at least she thinks it's the guy she knew - which leads to her recollections about this man in his youth but leaves us with no surprising insights. In Legends we get a long story - perhaps the longest in this book (20+ pp) in which a woman tells an interviewer (and recollects for herself) her long romantic/sexual relationship with her late neighbor, a well-know composer - but again we don't get much info at the end beyond what we learned in the set-up 20 pages back. Still, each story vividly presents its setting and its characters, without fuss or flourish; all told, AA would have been better served had there been a late-life collection of 15 of her best stories.