Skip to main content
review: fiction

On the surface, Driving on the Rim, Thomas McGuane's 10th novel, is a pleasant and optimistic tale even when its cast of oddballs twist and turn a strong plot and robust characterization in near-tragic directions. It is narrated by Irving Berlin Pickett, a hapless and helplessly naive small-town doctor in Montana, who is under suspicion of negligent homicide in the death of a former lover.

The harshest thing that can be said of it is that it's a bit of a slog for the first 57 pages, until you begin to get the drift of where McGuane is heading when he overexposes the ways Dr. Pickett doesn't understand the complexity of his own motives or those of his childhood mentors, friends, fellow doctors and patients.

From the get-go, this book does have immediate appeal for readers who like dogs and horses and big western skies and gorgeous landscapes: McGuane spent much of the past decade writing some of the finest non-fiction ever crafted about horsemanship, fishing and Montana.

To get to less obvious reasons for diving deeper into Dr. Pickett's ruminations (and it might mean reading those first pages a second time), it's worth remembering that half a lifetime ago, McGuane was "Captain Berserko," one of the wildest, craziest, most notorious and talented novelists in the United States, the comic genius of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.

After he published three amazingly well-written novels in a four-year span - all cult classics that appeal to a broader readership than aging hippies ( The Sporting Club, The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety-Two in the Shade), The New York Times led the way in tagging McGuane as William Faulkner's successor. With greater seriousness and more self-control, Saul Bellow described McGuane as "a language star" of American literature. And a sizable number of graduate students, junior teachers and would-be novelists began to define American cultural literacy in terms of those who read McGuane and those who didn't.

Then McGuane went Hollywood in 1973 and, in a legendary half-decade of success, excess and disrepute, wrote the screenplays for Rancho Deluxe and Missouri Breaks, directed his own adaptation of 92 in the Shade, and starred on a lot of supermarket tabloid covers with his lover Elizabeth Ashley, his then-wife Margot Kidder and his pal Jack Nicholson, before smashing up his literary career with the publication of Panama (1978). Deeply autobiographical, Panama was generally regarded as a monument to self-absorption and wasted talent, and proof positive that F. Scott Fitzgerald got it right when he said, "There are no second acts in American lives." Driving on the Rim closes out McGuane's remarkable remaking of himself and the reshaping of his fiction.

For the past 33 years, McGuane has resisted the obsession to write novel upon novel that grips Philip Roth (and so many lesser writers) in order to work longer, harder hours trying to discover how a man might live as a reasonable and responsible human being in the United States, in peace and serenity with himself, his family, his community and the natural world. He and Laurie Buffett (singer/songwriter Jimmy's sister) have found it for themselves by raising cattle on a 2,000-acre ranch in south-central Montana, where they also breed and train cutting horses. McGuane writes fiction when he has something new to say.

In Driving on the Rim, Dr. Pickett is looking for something more meaningful than practising general medicine in a clinic in small-town Middle America. The ways this "Irving Berlin" finds deliverance from the untrue dichotomies posed by his enemies and the prefabricated choices proposed by his friends place McGuane's writing alongside Barbara Kingsolver's. They are the U.S. masters of the art of discovering moral worth among those generally misjudged as unworthy of serious attention, and they write as bitingly as Mark Twain to boot.

Contributing reviewer T.F. Rigelhof's most recent book is Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels Since 1984.

Interact with The Globe