The problem with the Barton siblings in Strout's novel

Elizabeth Strout seems to be losing her way in the middle of her 2017 novel (or collection of linked stories, if you prefer), Anything Is Possible, as we get 2 long chapters that seem to go over familiar ground, without advancing either the plot or our sense of (and compassion for) the main characters: in Mississippi Mary the youngest, the favorite, daughter, Angelina, goes to Italy to visit with her 70+-uear-old mother, for the first time since her mother left for Italy to marry an Italian man 20 years her junior w/ whom she fell in love. Contrary to what one might expect, this is not a marriage, on either side, about $; the mother had a prosperous life back in the U.S., though a marriage roiled by infidelity. Now she is living in some squalor on the Italian coast, but enjoying her life and new surroundings. It takes Angela some time to appreciate this, and the story keeps meandering back and forth, with the mother pleading for A's affection and understanding, which at the end she seems to have attained. The story consists largely of dialog and contains no highly dramatic or surprising moments, in my view. The next story or chapter is the first in which Lucy Barton, the daughter from a highly impoverished and at times abusive family, returns to her home town in Illinois and marks her first appearance in this novel, though most or even all of the stories reference Lucy, a famous author who has just published a memoir (which may or may not be Strout's preceding novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton). Lucy visits her brother, in a very awkward scene in which he tries to make his run-down house attractive enough for his long-gone sister (though they talk by phone weekly); other sister, Vicky, pays a surprise visit, leading to lots of bickering about family history and an account or a truly horrendous incident of abuse regarding eating practices. All told, this chapter, again, is a lot of talk and adds little information to our store of knowledge about Lucy and her environs. In fact, this story further highlights the question as to why Lucy seems to still hold a great deal of love and affection for her (now deceased) parents; I know that Strout's writing is all about compassion, ours for her characters and her characters for one another, but in this case I think the normal human reaction would be for Lucy and her siblings to just say FY to their parents, who treated them so horribly and may have ruined their chances for happiness and acceptance in life. These adults are survivors, and if Strout truly has compassion for her characters she'll let them cut loose from their troubled past.