'Driving on the Rim': Tom McGuane's Montana-set story of a lifelong onlooker

'Driving on the Rim'

by Thomas McGuane

Knopf, 306 pp., $26.95

In "Driving on the Rim," much is made of the fact that our feckless hero's mother named him after Irving Berlin: I.B. Pickett, sometime house painter, mostly M.D., known as Berl. His mother reveres Berlin because he wrote "God Bless America," an anthem that fits right in with her evangelical Christianity.

Berl finds his name indicative of "a borrowed life," a concept which begins to explain his lack of engagement at critical times. He is an onlooker, trying to figure it all out.

Berl's mother and father, itinerant rug-shampooers, are loving parents who are utterly clueless about rearing a child. She is busy with her religious splinter groups and he just tries to stay out of the way. Berl is farmed out to various people who teach him their version of getting on in the world: mostly how to smoke, drink, hunt and fornicate.

Enter Dr. Eldon Olsson, the savior who takes Berl under his wing. Olsson is a bird hunter, a doctor and a born loner. He takes over the education of Berl, who has to date shown no particular academic prowess. Berl says: "I could tell when I ran into my old teachers that they still viewed me as a dunce. Though I had become a good student by the end of my high school years, you never get a second chance to make a first impression."

He perseveres, becomes a doctor and finds that he is quite good at it and loves it. Through a series of misadventures, Berl is accused of negligent homicide in the death of a former lover. This is serious business, but in McGuane's hands it becomes just a quirky bump in the road.

Thomas McGuane, author of 14 works of fiction and nonfiction, is at his very best when writing about the Montana landscape and fishing; that's where he becomes a poet in the grand tradition of Roderick Haig-Brown and Norman Maclean: "I got lost in space as the long line opened over the water and settled. There was something ancient and fatalistic about it, like making the sign of the cross: I had done my part; the line tightened and swung through the world of the fish. It was not up to me. I just made the cast and awaited the results."

The results here are a mixture of picaresque narrative and a deep love for the environment.