Charles Baxter's most reccent stories - a move toward open plot structure

The last 3 stories in Charles Baxter's collection "Gryphon" show how Baxter's style has evolved toward a more open structure. Mr. Scary (another great story title!) is about a 12-year-old boy, obviously a social misfit, and story is mostly told from the POV of the boy's grandmother, who is his primary caretaker, and we learn over the course of the narrative that the grandmother and the boy's mother (never appearing in the story) are or were both unconventional, social rebels - though the grandmother is now in a second marriage with a sweet and totally conventional guy, and she's a little bored with him. Like most of Baxter's most recent stories, this one is a little less about plot and more about character and mood - and like almost all of his stories it build to an equilibrium, with the characters regressing toward the norm: the boy is a little less "scary" at the end, agreeing to play a baseball game with some neighbors. Wish the story didn't end with a ball snapping into a glove - seems too easy an image, and baseball is way over-used as a literary device. Final two stories, The Cousins and the Winner, both follow same course toward openness. The Cousins a particularly strong and unusual story: revolves around a very dramatic death, possibly a suicide, but that incident told of just in passing, and the story about a series of conversations before the death and after, with the surviving spouse. Baxter in most recent stories exploring how to give a story its direction by indirection and by reflection.