Driving on the Rim (review)

George W. Ackerman. FARMER READING HIS FARM PAPER. Coryell County, Texas. 1931. 1998 print from the original negative. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Extension Service (33-SC-15754c).

If Thomas McGuane ever writes a memoir, I will, for reasons scholarly and prurient, buy it as soon as it hits the bookstores. It’s possible that he might someday tell the story of his life, since self-abuse has been a constant theme in his work, but until he does, Driving on the Rim, McGuane’s newest novel, is sufficient to allow readers to examine the white space on the page and intuit the movement of the author from geekdom to a fully realized life through the first-person narrative of Irving Berlin Pickett, his protagonist. Offering a presentation more lush than in previous novels, McGuane takes his time to develop characters and the settings they inhabit, primarily Montana. For example, the plot is not as linear as in Something to Be Desired (1984) or Nobody’s Angel (1979) while the characters are fully developed, unlike those in previous novels who are less detailed and secondary to McGuane’s gorgeous word drawings of landscapes, dogs, and horses. Writing the stories collected in Gallatin Canyon (2007) appears to have slowed his tempo down, and readers are the beneficiaries, whether we are McGuane scholars capable of seeing parallels between author and protagonist or first-timers thinking inductively.

If speculation is not your thing and you simply wish to enjoy the craft of a superb writer, Driving on the Rim will satisfy in that regard, for this tenth novel displays McGuane’s prodigious and fully mature skills. Apparent is McGuane’s legendary word gift, as is his ability to create the picaresque, a comic situation in which a smart and smart-ass dweeb possessing a talent for irony somehow bumbles through bizarre situations. This flawed protagonist discovers his basic goodness (not to be confused with following social conventions) and ultimately finds a place to make a stand by learning to love the land and find a woman he respects and loves. Moreover, Driving on the Rim displays a tender wonderment about mortality and its mysterious comings and goings. Such eschatological musings have long been a part of McGuane’s work, but the kind of fierce anger as expressed by Patrick Fitzpatrick in Nobody’s Angel over the suicide of his sister has cooled into acceptance appropriate for the author once known as Captain Berserko and now a successful renaissance man, married for over thirty years and a grandfather. No doubt, McGuane, like so many Boomers contemplating past scrapes, wrecks, misadventures, and losses, has looked around and mused, “God almighty! How did I make it this far?”

In this vein, it is appropriate that I. B. Pickett is a doctor, a bedside observer of his patients’ most private moments. Pickett practices an iconoclastic and humanistic form of medicine ultimately leading to a charge of negligent homicide. As the plot unspools, we see Pickett’s unpropitious beginnings and how an older doctor in Livingstone, Montana (a place called Deadrock by McGuane for many years), mentors Pickett, finally helping him through medical school. Embedded in the novel is a string of dalliances for the protagonist, beginning at age fourteen with his aunt Silbie and moving to an assortment of paramours, concluding with a pair of women, the truly dangerous Jocelyn (a character bearing a strong resemblance to Emily from Something to Be Desired) and Jinx, a pediatrician and longtime friend who becomes Pickett’s long-term love, shelter, and teacher.

Further, as is so often true in McGuane’s writing, nature is the fundament, the I AM upon which all else exists. “I have always found in nature something of a cosmic liturgy,” Pickett says, and its embrace provides the purifying sacrament that erases mendacity and is a bulwark against the self-important stance of the small town as well as the...