Freestyle narration and Alice (The Great) Munro

Always a pleasure to come across a story by Alice (the Great) Munro in a New Yorker, and her current story, Axis, is a showcase for some of the signature qualities and characteristics that make her one of the great living writers in English: the way the story veers suddenly, changing its focus seemingly (starting off to be a story about two girlfriends in college, then become a story about one of the girls and her boyfriend) and her uncanny sense of how to use vary the pace of the story - as in Axis, in which the first 2/3rds of the story encompass the scope of about a year in the life of the four central characters, then it concentrates on one weekend in which the college boyfriend visits the girl's family on their remote Ontario farm and meets the dreaded mother for the first time, then lurching forward 40 years or so, in which the characters are late in life and two come across each other and catch up, sorta - a typically Munro-like capacious structure, that few other writers could emulate or even try to do so. All that said, Axis isn't really one of her best stories. It's still Munro, so there are amazing elements - the scene with the mother coming across the her daughter and boyfriend in bed, and the coldness and self-righteousness of the mother, the boyfriend's realization that this could never be his life - but would he really leave and abandon forever this girl he thinks he loves? Didn't seem probable to me. And maybe it was a huge mistake - at the end we learn that he'd never married, and she too had come to some unspecified solitary end. Or maybe they just weren't right for each other, and both knew that in some way and needed the intervention of the mother to realize that or act on it. Imagine how Updike would have treated this material though - very differently. Guy would have been more gallant for sure! Munro has adopted and perfect a very freestyle narration, but in this one the freedom doesn't really help her as the characters behave in ways that make sense only in the story - not in life.