Story marking new territory for McGuane

Tom McGuane story The Motherlode in the current New Yorker is one of the best I've seen in this magazine in years. McGuane recently has been writing a lot of stories about the nouveaux riches in the Northwest, Montana specifically, or, if not quite the riches, at least the professional class that is making money - realtors, car dealers - from the vacationing Hollywood moguls on the play-ranches. This story marks another shift for McGuane: it's about a slice of Northwest-Plains State culture, but the characters here are the outsider-loser-strivers so typical of American fiction, especially short fiction. The main character - story told in very close 3rd-person narration - is a 20-something guy, not especially driven or intelligent, living at home w/ mom still, who's started a reasonably successful business at cow-insemination, much in demand among the ranchers of Montana, and he's good at it. The job is kind of like a traveling salesman's and he has a route across Montana and as he makes his rounds. In one small town he notices he's being watched by a kind of creepy guy who inexplicably says he's come there to watch the comets; the guy comes up to him in a parking lot, holds a gut to his ribs, and orders him to give him a ride to a ranch about 2 hours away. From this kidnapping episode a whole skein of events unravels, as the protagonist, feeling like the outsider sucker he is, joins in an obscure drug-running scheme. The narration shows McGuane at his best - simple, clear prose that is filled with sharp observation and shrewd turns of phrase but that never draws attention to style or voice and keeps the story moving rapidly toward it's stunning conclusion. If this marks new territory for McGuane, it looks like a rich field: the underbelly beneath the recent Western prosperity, the young who see all the wealth around them and want a piece of that action, by whatever means