Some new territory for Tom McGuane

Tom McGuane's story Hubcaps in the current New Yorker seems a bit of a departure for him - as he's been writing most recently, it seems, about men in the "new West," people mostly in Montana enjoying, if that's the right word, the new prosperity, brought about by money from LA spread about for vacation homes and spare ranches; his characters are realtors, professional, the midly affluent and slightly estranged. But this story is set in what appears to be Michigan, perhaps near Detroit, and set in what appears to be the late 1040s or early 1950s - though his reference to Maury Wills seems to throw the time scheme way off and may be an author's blunder. It's something like a boyhood-memory story, but it's not told by a man looking back but told as if we were in 1940, when kids played sandlot baseball and stole auto hubcaps. There are some great moments in this story or short fiction or whatever it's meant to be, mostly regarding the suffering of the young protagonist in the shadow of his parents' alcoholism: a sold middle-class suburban professional family in which both parents drink heavily and get by. The protag finds refuge through neighborhood baseball and friendship with a neighborhood kid who has both physical and mental disabilities - in those days obviously people were much less sensitive and informed, and there's a lot of bullying, which leads to some sorrow. The most harrowing scene, no doubt, is when protag is playing ball and his father comes by and decides the game needs and umpire, but all the kids are aware that the dad is in the tank and gradually desert the field and the game. Another powerful moment, when protag comes home to find fire trucks outside the house and mother shooing away neighbors, saying it was just a grease fire, etc. - but oddly everyone seeming to understand that there's much more going on in that household than they can discern. My only complaint about this otherwise fine story is that it's not really a story at all, just a passage; I'm not necessarily a stickler for stories coming to a definitive conclusion, and admire many of the "open" stories that define much of 20th-century fiction from Joyce onward, but this story doesn't come to any conclusion whatsoever, just stops; the best open stories leave us with a little more, with an image or an insight that may raise issues and feelings rather than resolve them. This story ends abruptly, so maybe it isn't a story after all?