Welty at sea: Trying to write about young romance and sex in Going to Naples

The last story in Eudora Welty's final collection of stories, Going to Naples (in The Bride of the Innisfallen, in "Collected Stories") typifies the strengths and weaknesses of Welty's late work (though not really that late - early 50s, and she lived and wrote for another 20 years or so): whole story takes place on shipboard, bound for Italy, in the lower decks, with a mixed group of Italians returning home after or for a visit, and mostly Italo-Americans, particularly a young woman Gabriella, from Buffalo, large and high-spirited, in search (or so her mother hopes) of a good match. There's plenty of high-jinks comedy, some scenes - the night of seasickness, for example - very well described, a huge cast of characters sharply defined. And yet: it's a story, much like a voyage, that takes us from point a to point b, but, also like a voyage, without any significant arc or crisis. Are the characters truly changed by the end of the voyage? Have we learned anything from observing them? Like many of her longer stories, it's a snapshot, or more precisely, a video, of a period of time, a sequence of events, but without enough revealed to us - there's no denouement, conclusion, or evident point. Reading these late Welty stories makes it clear that she continued to push the edges of the form, but that her thoughts were turning more toward novels - stories didn't really suit her temperament at this point in her career. Going to Naples is one of the very few Welty stories that takes place outside of the South and does not concern Mississippians in any way; she does a great job sketching this motley crew of characters, but she's a little "at sea" when trying to describe young romance - as in other Welty stories, the sex scene is so quick and ambiguous that you have to read go back and re-read to (try to) determine whether it happened at all. In her later stories, Welty tried to push her subject matter well beyond the limitations of her experience - she should not be and did not want to be typed as a Southern regionalist - but in some instances her material falls apart, whether because of too much discretion, indirection, or incapacity of imagination, it's hard to say.