Talkin' bout my generaton: Ann Beattie's short fiction

Good Ann Beattie story in current New Yorker, Save a Horse Ride a Barmaid, exhibiting Beattie's well-known wit, quirkiness (the title alone, drawn from a bumper sticker from a passing car), and shrewd observations of the zeitgeist and in particular of her (my) generation - would be an good study or dissertation for someone to follow the gradual aging of Beattie characters across long arc of her (their) career - from the young, feckless, self-conscious betrayed-by-love in her (I think) first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, to her more recent Maine stories, most of which have protagonists in the 60+ range, although they still have encounters, as in this story, with a people a generation (or two) younger. Beattie seems to be trying something new for her in this story, an unfolding narrative, a style or design pioneered by Alice Munro, a good writer to emulate: the story starts w/ 70-something man who rear-ends a car with two college-aged women aboard. He's upset, and calls his brother, a lawyer (it's his brother's suv he's driving) to extricate him - so for the first third or so of the story we think it will be about the driver but it turns out that all of the rest of the story is about the brother: recently widowed, lonely and angry (wife died when receiving the wrong Rx at a Boston hospital - as happened in a famous Boston case), recalling his service in Vietnam at various points, in process of selling the house they lived in together, spends times spying thru binoc's at the house and sees a reclusive neighbor dancing on the street w/ new, younger girlfriend. Like almost all Beattie stories this one is profusely populated; my only quibble with the story: I wish she hadn't made the neighbor's new girlfriend one of the two women in the car - it's just a little too neat a trick w/out enough payback, an unneeded authorial intrusion. That aside, the story gets at the troubled mind of the lawyer/brother beautifully and effectively, without recourse to cheap tricks like dreams or long confessionals, and we learn about him incrementally - only toward the end do we learn about his military service and his difficult recovery from the trauma of the war. This is kind of a reach-back to the early troubled days of Beattie's people - and really across her whole body of work to one of the founding tenets and traumas of her (my) generation.