Realism, Hyper-realism, Charles Baxter's short fiction

Next three stories from Charles Baxter's 1990 collection brought together in his collection "Gryphon" all have simple titles and are rather traditional stories: a boy goes out for a drive with his older brother, who picks up his girlfriend, a kind of initiation for the younger brother; a man becomes obsessed with the problem of the homeless and errantly brings a homeless man into his tidy home with kind of dire consequences; a young Swede on a business trip to Detroit meets a beautiful young woman and oddly falls in love with her (in one day) and she jilts him. Okay, none of these is particularly dramatic - in fact, the capsule summaries of each that I just wrote make each one sound more dramatic than it actually is; for example, the homeless man: can you imagine how much devastation he could have caused? (Did you see Boudu Saved from Drowning, or Down and Out in Beverly Hills), destroying the house, freaking out the kid, breaking up the marriage? But in Baxter's distinct and recognizable style, the stories touch on the odd and the dangerous but revert back to a default position of normal - his characters are kind and gentle souls, caring, a bit foolhardy, and they do crazy things (going to a park in Detroit to pick up a girl?), and though things tend to work out okay they are in some way moved and changed by their experiences - much as in life. Baxter's stories are in that way hyper-realistic - not the pared-down realism of a Carver but hyper-real like a high-def photo, that makes you scrutinize what's in the picture and ponder what's outside the frame. The true model may Chekhov.