Driving on the Rim

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.

-- "New York Times"

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.

-- "Washington Post"

McGuane adds another rueful portrait to his gallery of flawed masculine types, set, again, in Big Sky Country...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.

-- "Publishers Weekly"

The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. Berl Pickett, MD, whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school. But there must be meaning to existence beyond professional accreditation, and though scantly equipped, Berl Pickett has been on a mission to find it, despite being charged with negligent homicide in the death of his former lover, a business that lays bare the true benefits of small-town living.