On the Mend, review by Maile Meloy

  

DRIVING ON THE RIM

By Thomas McGuane

306 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

     The narrator of Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” is a Montana doctor who was given the name Irving Belin Pickett by his patriotic, evangelical mother, after the writer of “God Bless America.” Berl, as he’s known, describes himself as “irritable, hypercritical, obsessively orderly, claustrophobic, impatient, antisocial and agoraphobic, filled with objectless dread, pessimistic and fault-­finding.” All this might be true, but he’s also a good doctor, and he’s funny, sometimes with a sharp, sardonic wit and sometimes with a goofy self-deprecation. In the way of McGuane’s earlier American quasi ­heroes, he’s both competent and hapless, discovering, in his search for meaning, “that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience.”

The novel is a picaresque, circling back to Berl’s early life with unstable, itinerant parents and a lustful aunt. When his parents catch the 14-year-old Berl in bed with her, “the fact that they were guests in Aunt Silbie’s double-wide in no way prevented their attempting to chase her outside without her clothes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun, and Silbie pulled hers on Mom and Dad; just to make a clean sweep of it, she evicted all three of us.”

The boy needs a mentor, and finds one in a bird-hunting physician, Dr. Olsson, just when his parents have “entered a period they called Boozing for Christ.” Dr. Olsson’s life is ordered and disciplined where Berl’s is chaotic. He wears glasses except to shoot, and has a bird dog so reliable that “when she was pointing a covey he patiently removed his glasses, slipped them into his pocket, and then flushed the birds.” He takes the boy hunting and eventually sends him to college in Ohio. Berl becomes a doctor to please his mentor, and also, he admits, out of a desire to be rich.

Complications arise, as they often do for McGuane’s characters, in the form of a woman, or actually two women, or actually three or four. One is an archivist named Tessa Larionov, with “the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous.” At 30, she has lured an elderly rare-prints dealer back to Montana, with a covetous and curatorial eye on his collection. The 20-year-old Berl falls in with Tessa after she accuses him of making obscene phone calls. “Oh?” he says to the police chief, in the equable (and ineffectual) way he will respond to later accusations of other crimes. “I don’t own a phone.” Their affair is brief, and while Berl makes his way through medical school and back home to practice, Tessa’s life disintegrates, and she winds up disinherited and homeless.

Meanwhile, a patient named Clarice, whom Berl met when she was an inventive young hitchhiker, has become resigned to beatings by her evil-minded husband. When the abuse finally leads to murder — “I told her nobody can live on Chicken McNuggets and popcorn,” her husband says by way of justification. “It’s not like she wasn’t warned” — Berl’s considered medical opinion is that the man should kill himself too, and for once his advice is taken.

Shortly after the murder-suicide, the once indomitable Tessa arrives in Berl’s emergency room, having stabbed herself with a bread knife. He tries to save her but can’t (he’s the only one who can tell us that, but I believe him). In a small town full of rivalries and rumors, suspicions mount that he killed Tessa, and because Berl feels guilty about Clarice’s husband’s death, he refuses, in a detached and fatalistic way, to defend himself. He pleads nolo contendere to the entire town.

But that’s only the beginning. Almost exactly halfway through the novel, a plane crashes, dropping an auburn-haired pilot named Jocelyn Boyce into Berl’s life. She gives him something not to feel detached about, but she’s a whirlwind of trouble. Berl’s quest to be shriven for his crimes, as if that will provide a comprehensible shape to his life, veers off into an extended, deluded search for Jocelyn.

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. (McGuane’s ­essays and short stories, on the other hand, are taut and controlled, and he expertly handles their cutting-horse turns.) In one of the funniest passages, Tessa and Berl take a tango lesson, with ­disastrous results. “Señor!” the Argentine master cries. “Grappling has no place in our national dance!”

Berl’s patients show up throughout with medical complaints, even after he’s expelled from his clinic, and his interest in their life stories belies his claims of self-absorption. He also has a best friend to stand by him: a lovely and opinionated pediatrician named Jinx Mayhall. She knows Berl is driven by guilt and desire, but thinks, according to his lawyer, that he’s “cuter than a speckled pup.” She likes his wit and despairs of his folly, and waits for him to come around. “You seem to have dropped a stitch right in the middle of your life and it is time for you to do something else,” she tells him. “Perhaps you find it difficult living in a morally bankrupt and hate-filled nation, and it’s not for me to say. But you go around like a cat ruining a blanket trying to find a place to lie down.”

McGuane’s characters are always keenly written, and that makes it bewildering when continuity falters and the illusion that they’re real people falls apart. Depending on which clues I used from the book, Berl Pickett was born no earlier than 1964, or in exactly 1960, or in the 1940s. I’ve thought about whether this could be intentional unreliability in the narrator, but I think it’s just a mistake that should have been caught in editing — and it’s one of many. Another character is both 65 and in his mid-30s at the same moment, and a third is both alive and dead.

In some ways, such continuity errors don’t matter; in other ways they really do. It matters whether Berl is in his 30s or his 60s when he’s chasing the wrong woman — not just to how we picture him physically, but to how we experience and enjoy and weigh him. It’s hard to know what to do with both possible ages, except to wish, presumptuously, for a time machine and a crack at the book in manuscript.

Still, 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 hedonistic lawyer defending Berl against homicide charges tells him: “Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.” It’s my favorite line in the novel, and you can’t help rooting for Berl to figure things out. Because everyone drops a stitch now and then, and who’s to say that we all shouldn’t get such a pass?

Maile Meloy’s latest book is a story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Meloy-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print