Thoughts on characters, setting, and dialogue in Strout's Olive, Again

Somewhat surprisingly, Olive Kitteredge is not the main character in several of the stories in Elizabeth Strout's collection of linked stories, Olive, Again (2019) - well, why not brand the collection with the name of your most famous character, even if the title is slightly misleading. One of the best stories for sure in the collection is very much about Olive and her troubles: Motherless Child, which appeared recently in the New Yorker. This story is painful in its analysis, like a patient etherised upon a table to coin a phrase (not), of the relationship between OK and her son, Christopher and his wife and children: an extraordinarily painful visit, first time in 3 years OK has seen her son, of the son and his wife and their brood of 3 children (two of them hers from previous relationship/s). Olive's bluntness and impatience, charming in its way in many of her appearances in ES's fiction, here is her undoing: She is rude and inconsiderate of her guests, for ex. her utter failure in having the refrigerator stocked and ready for the arrival of 3 young children. Toward the end of the visit, OK tells her son that she's planning t marry her new/current partner, Jack (I mistakenly called him George in a previous post), which sends son into a fit of self-pity; ultimately, when they meet, the two guys shake hands and seem willing to make the best of things - but Olive sees the terrible state of her son's marriage and comes to the painful realization that he had married someone much like her, his mother. In another story in this collection Olive makes no appearance at all - but even w/out her it's a powerful piece about a woman whose father has just died in a house fire who comes home to Casby, Maine to deal with his estate, during which time she engages in a long discussion w/ the estate lawyer and old family friend about her father and his infidelity. This story is especially "talky," and it seems as if it could a brief play - probably too much dialog and not enough setting and atmosphere as this collection merits. It occurs to me that, despite her use of this fictional Maine coastal town as her locus, ES makes little of the setting in this collection; at least through the first half, the stories could have taken place pretty much anywhere in the U.S. (or Canada - many of these stories seem like homages to Alice the Great Munro).