Stories by two great writers in one week: Munro, Trevor

Reading Charles May's blog entry on Corrie shows me how fallible memory can be - my recollection of the details of the various endings of Alice Munro's great story Corrie all veered in various ways from what she actually wrote - although I'm glad that I at least did remember that the endings in the two versions (that I read, there's a yet a 3rd) did differ - and I think the original was the sharper and more poignant, at least holding the possibility that she tells that bastard off and moves on with her life. This is an especially fortunate week for lovers of the short story as we not only have at hand Munro's latest collection, Dear Life, but the current New Yorker brings us a new story by William Trevor - and I do go with the accepted opinion that they are the two greatest living English-language short-story writers. That said, I don't think Trevor's current story, The Women, is one of his best although it is representative of many of the themes he has been recently examining: in this case, a young woman raised by her single dad whom she believes to be widowed but whom we know had been deserted by his young wife; the girl never met her mother. She goes off to a boarding school where she begins to notice two middle-aged women essentially stalking her; eventually they approach her, invite her to visit them at home, offer her flowers, actually know her name. All this would be creepy and mysterious, except that of course we know or can quickly surmise that one of the women is actually her mother. So the story touches on the great themes of loneliness (the girl's, her father's, her mother's) and class (a sub-element is her struggle to fit in at the boarding school, where she feels isolated and a little bit bullied) and the vagaries of love and the lives of quiet desperation that so many people lead (the quick portrait of the mother and her friend-housemate is very striking and mysterious: are they a lesbian couple?) - but isn't it obvious that the story could be improved with better narrative construction, holding back some elements so that we, too, are puzzled by the appearance of these women? Shouldn't the girl's discovery of her origins have some effect on her behavior and on her relationship to her beloved father? It's a story that needs both less and more - and perhaps this story is part of a longer piece over the course of which the relations among the characters will unfold and develop. So whom am I to be telling William Trevor how to write?