Thirteen Ways of Looking: Collection or Connection?

So it does turn out that Colum McCann's Thirteen Ways of Looking is a collection of stories, with the title piece being almost a short novel, taking up half the book (I started to suspect same when I realized section 13 was only about half-way through the ebook v I'm reading). I admire the title story as a rare blend or at least juxtaposition of Joycean psychology insight, word-play, and literary and cultural references set beside a police procedural: we learn early on that we're looking at the last day in the life of the protagonist, an 82-year-old retired judge who goes out to lunch w/ his quite unlikable and contentious son and, after lunch, is assaulted on the sidewalk and dies on the spot. Several of the chapters involve NYC detectives reviewing surveillance video and, later, conducting interrogations, to find out who killed Mendelssohn (and why, if there is a reason). I won't give anything away here,  but I wonder if others will find the conclusion satisfactory or even credible. The next story is like a literary sleight of hand: author gets assignment to write a New Year's story for a newspaper (the Times?) and story encompasses his many attempts to write the story and to think about what he's written (it's about a soldier serving in Afghanistan who calls home for the holiday). Am now in midst of 3rd story, which is about a single mother raising an adopted son who has some severe learning disabilities - she takes him swimming, in wet suit, on the rough Irish coast and he seems to get in a little over his head in both senses. Someone told me the stories in this volume were loosely connected; so far, I don't see even a loose connection. It's a collection, not a connection - I think.