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Overview
From one of America’s most acclaimed literary figures (“an important as well as brilliant novelist”—The New York Times Book Review) a major new novel that hilariously takes the pulse of our times.The unforgettable voyager of this dark comic journey is I. B. “Berl” Pickett, M.D., the die of whose uncharmed life was probably cast as soon as his mother got the bright idea to name him after Irving Berlin. The boyhood insults to any chance of normalcy piled on apace thereafter: the traumatizing, spasmodic spectacle of Pentecostalist Sunday worship; the socially inhibitory accompaniment of his parents on their itinerant rug-shampooing business; the undue technical advancement and emotional retardation that ensued from his erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. What would have become of this soul had he not gone to medical school, thanks to the surrogate parenting of a local physician and solitary bird hunter?
But there is meaning to life beyond professional accreditation, even in the noblest of callings. Berl’s been on a mission to find it these past few years, though with scant equipment or basis for hope. Hard to say (for the moment anyway) whether his mission has been aided or set back by his having fallen under suspicion of negligent homicide in the death of his former lover. All the same, being ostracized by virtually all his colleagues at the clinic gives him something to chew on: the reality of small-town living as total surveillance more than any semblance of fellowship, even among folks you’ve known your whole life.
Fortunately, for Berl, it doesn’t take a village. And he will find his deliverance in continuing to practice medicine one way or another, as well as in the few human connections he has made, wittingly or not, over the years. The landscape, too, will furnish a hint in what might yet prove, if not a certifiable epiphany, a semi-spiritual awakening in I. B. Pickett, M.D., the inglorious but sole hero of Thomas McGuane’s uproarious and profound exploration of the threads by which we all are hanging.
Editorials
Maile Meloy
As with McGuane's earlier novels, the rambling plot is sustained because the individual episodes are a pleasure, often farcical and always acutely observed, and because the hero is sympathetic in his dissociated journey…there are riches here, especially sentence by crackling sentence, and McGuane is as good as ever on the redeeming aspects of a troubled country—on diving prairie falcons, the satisfactions of work, and people who tell absurd stories about themselves on their way to growing up.—The New York Times
Michael Lindgren
Berl Pickett, the feckless doctor, fisherman, lover and accused murderer who narrates Thomas McGuane's Driving on the Rim, is a splendid addition to the gallery of semi-cracked eccentrics who populate the literature of the American West…That McGuane is able to build a hugely amusing and even moving novel around such a resounding antihero is testament to the enduring charms of one of the odder careers in American letters.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
McGuane (Gallatin Canyon) adds another rueful portrait to his gallery of flawed masculine types, set, again, in Big Sky Country. Berl Pickett is a smalltown doctor whose ill-advised decision to try to cover up an old friend’s suicide attempt leads to dire consequences when she later dies from her injuries: his clinic privileges are suspended and he faces a possible criminal negligence charge. With plenty of time on his hands, Berl reverts to his former profession of house painter. Between jobs, he contemplates his past--seduced at 14 by his aunt, professionally inspired by a kindly doctor who alone saw the potential in him--and contends with a couple of women: Jocelyn, a pilot with a shady acquaintance, and colleague Jinx Mayhall, a quiet beauty who discomfits him with her pointed inquiries into his character. The novel is more contemplative than dramatic, ending, as it does, on a decidedly anticlimactic note, but readers who relish McGuane’s signature descriptions of hunting, fishing, birding, and cruising (in a rattletrap Olds Starfire 88) will once again be satisfied with the bard of the Absaroka Mountains’ laid-back take on contemporary American manhood. (Oct.)Library Journal
Rosenthal Award winner McGuane's (tommcguane.com) tenth novel is his first to be recorded on audio. Set in Montana, as his five previous novels have been, it is a first-person narrative centering on the life of I.B. Pickett, M.D. Schooled in the erotic arts by his own aunt at age 14, Pickett has the propensity for womanizing and poor decision-making that are matched only by his insightful observations regarding his own immaturity. While laugh-aloud hilarious, the tale is a bit overlong and occasionally rambles. Further, though narrator Traber Burns's no-nonsense, straightforward delivery is appropriate for Pickett, it lacks some inspiration. Recommended for public libraries expanding their offerings of men's fiction; especially recommended for those who enjoy the novels of Jim Harrison. [The Knopf hc was recommended "for fans and ambitious readers," LJ 7/10.—Ed.]—Carly Wiggins, Western Michigan Univ., KalamazooKirkus Reviews
In the latest from McGuane (Gallatin Canyon, 2007, etc.), the narrative voice is often very funny, but its skewed perspective comes at the expense of plot momentum and character development.
In the first sentence, the protagonist introduces himself as "Berl Pickett, Dr. Berl Pickett," before proceeding to explain that his full name is "Irving Berlin Pickett," his mother's choice, where his father had wanted "Lefty Frizzell Pickett," which, the narrator says, "would have been worse." Though perhaps more appropriate, for the novel is like one long string of honky-tonk jukebox selections, offering various themes on love gone wrong or awry, sex as a substitute for love, love as a substitute for sex, and the ultimate question of whether friendship is a necessary component for love or the antithesis of romance. The narrator defines love as "that moronic oblivion that makes the world go round," and explains that "the essence of romance (is an) indifference to truth." Yet the small-town Montana doctor is less a cynic than a hopeless romantic, his life complicated by not only a series of inappropriate or misguided sexual liaisons but a couple of deaths that occur on his watch. He faces manslaughter charges in the one for which he insists he is innocent, an innocence tarnished by the guilt he feels in the other death, a complicity that no one suspects. There is also an airplane crash, which both results in another ill-fated romantic quest and provides thematic resonance with the references to 9/11 scattered here and there. If such summary sounds like a jumble, the narrator himself suggests that his account may be suspect, that "We had, between how I was perceived by my colleagues and the ways in which I saw myself, true cognitive dissonance," and that "I started to look for signs of craziness in myself, and I found plenty." Though the novelist has often balanced metaphysical depth with dark humor, here the balance seems off.
Major author, minor work.
The Barnes & Noble Review
For a cynic, the novelist Thomas McGuane is quite the sunny optimist, at least on evidence of his latest protagonist, one Irving Berlin Pickett, M.D. The latter does pretty much everything a man could possibly do to discourage the eventuality of a happy ending -- using up about forty years of life in the process -- but finally gets there anyway, to the all-consoling redemptions of love.
There is much that needs redeeming. In a first-person narrative (the second time McGuane has used the mode, after 1978's Panama), the housepainter-cum-doctor, a self-described "ninny" but actually an acute observer of both general human and peculiarly American folly, recounts innumerable instances of indiscriminate coupling (wives of friends, nurses, patients, even an aunt) and wise-ass foolhardiness. Among instances of this last are uncomfortably close involvements with suicides and ill-advised retaliations against rivals of all stripes. For much of the book, he writes his own cautionary tale against moving through life as a purely reactive being who lacks a considered code of morality. It naturally makes him a magnet for character-trying events: "Nowadays, experiences came at me like bugs hitting the windshield."
But what fascinating bugs they are, at least before they are so unceremoniously squashed: McGuane is a self-assured writer of great comedic powers, and he has an exquisitely calibrated sense of how far to go before dropping over the edge of the absurd. He also comes close to writing passages that are comedy-club ready:
The day came when Mrs. Vaughn discovered the uses to which the cabin cruiser was being put, and she divorced [T. Sam, a friend]. "Miss Lillian" had been named after her. He renamed the boat "Miss Ruby" after a subsequent lady friend, then "Miss Alice," then "Miss Judy," and so on the last time her transom was repainted, she was called "Queen for a Day."
As the locale of the story is Montana, McGuane's home and the compelling subject of much of his work, he is also customarily and seriously poetic about the natural world, including episodes where his anti-hero Pickett becomes lost in the wild, or goes fishing to soothe the incompletely examined roilings of his conscience: in the outdoors, he says, he always found "something of a cosmic liturgy." It is a better religion than that of his crackpot mother, who spoke in tongues and used to accost passersby on the street with visions of her god.
When the many tendrils of the story threaten to grow beyond the edges of any single narrative -- leafing off the main line of the narrator's already complex tales are those of his father's experiences in World War II, internecine machinations at the clinic in which he practices, and smaller shoots that concern riding horses and painting houses and birdwatching -- McGuane trims them back to the center of his picaresque comedy: the moment at which the salvations of love in the form of a good woman are finally embraced.
"Have I learned anything?" Pickett at one point asks, and if we know the answer is "Not really, because you just happen to be a lucky bastard," we ourselves have learned much. The paramount lesson is that Thomas McGuane writes like a well-aimed pistol shoots: fast, true, and straight to the heart.
--Melissa Holbrook Pierson