A writer largely overlooked: Elizabeth Spencer

Based on strong NYTBR review and on expectations from The Light in the Piazza, started Elizabeth Spencer's recent story collection, Starting Over, which will probably be her last (I think she's in her 90s now!) - not exactly clear when she wrote these stories but a few surface details from the first three would suggest they are from the past 15 years or so (reference to cell phones, CD players), although they  feel very old-fashioned - real throwbacks. Each of the first three is about a single moment of crisis in a family relationship; narration very traditional, cast of characters very small, and, as in the classic short story, centered on a single action: long-lost cousin arrives for surprise visit at same time as son home from college, bringing up memories of the family crisis that ensued when husband suspected wife of a drunken fling with the cousin - which may have led to her pregnancy (that is, the son may be the cousin's son) - very subtle clues make us think that this is the case, that the wife has been dissembling. The second story - The Boy in the Tree - a man trying to tend to his mother in her old age and near senility, despite a life of tension between his wife and mother - the big dramatic scene was a kitchen accident which led wife to cry out something like "what the fuck" - leading the mother to call her coarse and common - relationship never healed after that. Son is having strange hallucinations and dreams about people from his past; he mother reports seeing a "boy in a tree," which son believes is sign of her approaching senility - turns out there was a boy climbing a tree in her yard, so son has to wonder, which of them - he or his mother - is the troubled one. Third story, girl leaves her mom to go live with estranged father - whom, we learn, she nearly blinded in a careless accident - and mother and her fiance, a fairly loathesome guy, turn up to reclaim her. Each of these three stories could be a one-act play I think. They're fine as stories, too, although they also feel a little thin, fragile - this may be because of the difficulty locating them in time. The attitudes are very old-fashioned, for example, son coming home to discuss with father his plan to change his college major - do students even "major" any  more, much less discuss this with their parents? Or, girl running off to live with her father - plays pretty loose with contemporary laws about school enrollment and attendance, for example. Still these are powerful stories from a writer who, except for the one terrific novella that has earned a new life through Broadway adaptation, is largely overlooked.