Bozeman News

New West Book Review

A Ditzy Montana Doctor Narrates Thomas McGuane’s ‘Driving on the Rim’

By Jenny Shank, 10-25-10

Driving on the Rim
by Thomas McGuane
306 pages, $26.95

Dr. Berl Pickett, the narrator of Thomas McGuane’s funny and thoughtful tenth novel, is an odd one.  First there’s his name—Driving on the Rim begins, as Dickens’ Great Expectations did, with the narrator’s account of his unusual name.  Properly Irving Berlin Pickett, Berl explains, “my very forceful mother, a patriot and evangelical Christian, named me after the author of ‘God Bless America.’” Berl’s parents raised him on the road, free of many social graces, home-schooling him as they traveled around as itinerant carpet cleaners.  Berl did get an education, but not of the usual sort: when Berl was a teenager, he and his parents lived with his Aunt Silbie, who put him to strenuous use: “In my first six months in action Aunt Silbie taught me ninety-nine percent of everything I would ever know about sex,” Berl reports.

Driving on the Rim eventually outlines Berl’s entire off-kilter youth, detailing how the town doctor in Livingston, Montana, took an interest in him, paid for his college expenses, and convinced him to go to medical school.  But the book doesn’t proceed chronologically; instead it alights on one story after another from somewhere in Berl’s span of years, cycling around an incident for which Dr. Berl is accused of malpractice. 

Tessa, a woman who was once his friend (in the strange manner of Berl’s maladroit friendships) is brought into the hospital after an attempted suicide, and she dies under his care.  Berl doesn’t feel he did anything wrong, but the town turns against him, in part because Tessa once filed a complaint that Berl had been making obscene phone calls to her.  Her employer was actually the guilty party, but the police records don’t reflect this.  Yet, Berl feels guilty for other indiscretions, which makes him waver recklessly when deciding whether to plead not guilty when he’s to be brought to trial for Tessa’s death.

This is the plot, but the plot isn’t the main point of Driving on the Rim.  The real substance at the book’s heart is summed up in Berl’s observations about Don Quixote, which he reflects on before describing the death of an old ranch woman that he attended:

“I read a comic book version of Don Quixote when I was a boy, and then an abridged one as a young man, and finally I read it entirely in later years, and more than once.  It was now part of my general memory, and some of its ideas emerged unexpectedly, especially when I was oppressed by the feeling that I was living my life under an evil star and that everything in life was circular—the seasons and so on—except human life, which hastened in a straight line to the end, and moreover, without hope of renewal.”

Dr. Berl’s life circles around, the action interspersed with his reflections on life and death, new incidents reminding him of older ones, and the story he tells is pleasingly dense with jokes ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun"), episodes of small town and intra-hospital politics, and funny, unexpected moments, such as this one that occurs when Dr. Berl is barred from practicing while he awaits his trial, and returns to his former profession, house painting:

“Then, still in my rumpled white coveralls, I walked to the cemetery, pruning shears in my pocket and wearing a paper hat I had picked up at the paint store from a bin of promotional paper hats.  I chose one with a Rottweiler on the front (I liked dogs) without realizing that it advertised a condom popular with the hip-hop culture and urged the viewer, ‘Don’t be slippin’ in yo pimpin’’ on one side and ‘Get yo freak on’ on the other.  In fact, I was oblivious until I noticed the excitement it created among young people along my way to the cemetery.  I went on wearing it out of defiance despite the great urge to throw it away.  I wished I had picked the ‘Do yo thang’ hat I’d first spotted, but it lacked the dog picture.”

Who would have guessed that we would encounter the phrase “Get yo freak on” in a Tom McGuane novel?  Not me, but I’m so glad I did.

Driving on the Rim is filled with striking sentences ("They both beamed at me with the intense curiosity which we save for people we suspect might not be stable"), and observations about human nature that could have only come from a misfit like Berl, who watches everything from a position that is slightly off-center from that of the regular marrying, child-rearing folks he takes care off.  McGuane’s new novel is one to ramble through slowly and savor.

Thomas McGuane will discuss Driving On The Rim in Bozeman at the Country Book Shelf on October 28 (7 p.m.), and in Denver at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on November 15 (7:30 p.m.).

For more on Thomas McGuane, please see:

• An Interview with Thomas McGuane by David Abrams

• McGuane and Stegner Honored by Jenny Shank

• Thomas McGuane’s “Gallatin Canyon” Out in Paperback by Jenny Shank

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