Thirteen Ways - quite different from Let the Great World Spin

I'm in the 4th and final story, Treaty, in Colum McCann's collection Thirteen Ways of Looking, trying to discern what if anything holds these stories together and inevitably thoughts keep coming bck to trauma and unexpected loss. Perhaps these are very common themes in literature, or in short fiction in particular, of a certain type - plot-driven fiction rather that fiction driven by character, mood, or setting. Though McCann, Irish-born that he is, clearly reveres Joyce and emulates some Joycean devices, he's not one to have an open-ended story that ends w/ an image or epiphany. In his stories things happen, usually bad things. I am pretty sure that I'd read that McCann was a victim of some kind of attack - I will look it up after I finish the book - which might explain his interest in disaster and distress: the first story is about a fatal assault on an elderly man, the 2nd though less traumatic is about a soldier in Afghanistan, the 3rd is about a deaf child who goes swimming alone and (seemingly) drowns, the last story about a nun who'd been held captive by South American revolutionaries who tortured and abused her. These are not elements that I recall from his terrific novel Let the Great World Spin; now obviously writers can grow and change and select different material, and a novel is capacious and embracing in ways that stories, with their demands for a quick cut to the action or central theme, are only seldom. Spin, as I recall, was about the day in NYC history when a tightrope, walker crossed between the towers, and he tells of several different lives on that day - including the judge who heard the case about the tightrope walker (I don't think he's Mendelssohn from title story here but he could be). These stories, strong as they are, feel so different in mood and technique that it's hard to fathom they're from the same author.