The narrator of Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” is a Montana doctor who was given the name Irving Berlin 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.  Maile Meloyâs latest book is a story collection, âBoth Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.â
The rambling plot of Thomas McGuaneâs novel is held together by its pleasurable, acutely observed episodes, and by the sardonic Montana doctor at its center, sympathetic in his dissociated journey.