Disappointing ending to Strout's novel

In the end, I have to say that despite her many talents, including her ability to create a wide range of characters and to present each of them with insight and sympathy despite their man problems, maladies, and social malfeasance, no small feat, Elizabeth Strout lets us down in her 2017 novel, Anything Is Possible. She calls this a novel, though many would see it as a collection of linked stories, each about a character who has some relationship, however tenuous, with Lucy Barton, a woman who was a social misfit in the small Illinois town where she was raised and is now a successful writer living in NYC who has just published a memoir about her childhood. One would expect that the chapters/stories in this volume would build toward a conclusion and that the conclusion should have something to do w/ Lucy, whose memoir is what brings these characters and their stories into conjunction. But, no, Strout introduces Lucy in a chapter/story near the end of the novel but not at the conclusion, and in this chapter Lucy returns home for the first time in decades and meets w/ her brother and sister, whom she has not seen since she left home, and after some cold exchanges of words they begin to reminisce about their parents' cruelty until Lucy has a panic attack and gets her sibs to drive her to Chicago. Story just pretty much ends there, w/out any insight or revelation or dramatic climax. Then we get a few more stories/chapters, loosely connected w/ Lucy and with the Illinois town (Amgash?), and the novel concludes with a narrative about Lucy's cousin, a successful businessman, who returns to a theater post-performance to retrieve a toy left behind by his granddaughter and he encounters the lead actor who seems to be significantly disturbed and perhaps suicidal or worse; after they talk for sometime, the cousin has a heart attack and the actor calls rescue - an act of grace, I guess - but how can we really be satisfied with this is a conclusion to a novel? Not only does it center on a character about whom we know next to nothing, but he's completely uninteresting compared w/ the failed actor. Strout has fallen back on telling, rather than showing through action, and it seems to me her interest in this project waned as she neared the conclusion, or at least mine did.