The conclusions of some Alice Adams stories

Alice Adams's short stories - 53 of which are included in The Stories of Alice Adams, published 3 years after her death, in 2002 - cover a lot of the same ground, as I have in these posts: most of the stores are set in the SF Bay area, often about women raised in the South, and pretty much all of them are about marital infidelity in one form or another, and often about heavy consumption of alcohol (especially be the Southern parents) and, to a lesser extent, consumption of light hallucinogens, usually by the children. The protagonists, almost all of them white women of the professional class, are caught in them middle: not bound by the vows of fidelity but not ready to throw off all social mores. It would be easy to dismiss her stories as too concerned w/ what today (not in her day) we'd call "first-world problems." Generally, her characters are not in any desperate circumstance, sometimes they're quite comfortable, though they're, rightly, consumed by anxiety - especially the women who are dependent on their husbands as "providers." One typical story, Lost Luggage, is about a newly widowed woman who's concerned about how she can maintain her lifestyle; an airline loses he luggage on a return trip from Mexico, and she's most distressed about a notebook she'd been keeping, something like a diary. The story concludes w/ her vowing to continue writing, and getting pleasure from doing so. Another is about a woman concerned that her father's surviving spouse is putting the family house in the Berkeley Hills up for sale; she takes a look at the house, thinking of buying it herself (it's hilarious that she thought the house was worth $200k and it's on sale for half that because of its poor condition - just imagine its value today!) but after viewing it she decides she doesn't want it after all. I could go on - but one thing that does trouble me about these stories is that they tend to conclude in a soft manner, w/ the women starting afresh, off on their new life course. To me the more powerful stories in the collection provide a surprise, or a dramatic moment, at the conclusion - such as one in which the protagonist calls the man w/ whom she'd had a summer affair and he answers the phone and says in a loud voice: You must have the wrong #. That one hit me - and I wish she'd ended the Berkeley Hills story w/ something as emphatic as that, perhaps the woman saying bluntly: I don't need this crappy house! - really throwing off her past in a definitive manner.