Driving on the Rim
Book | Thomas McGuane
The legacy of Camus in small town Montana.
There's something a little grotesque about Irving Berlin Pickett, the narrator of Thomas McGuane's latest novel, Driving on the Rim. A doctor who lost his virginity to his own aunt, Pickett is an expert but disaffected ladies' man in small-town Montana. His Midwestern harem is quickly dissolved, however, after one of his women stabs herself with a bread knife, and another is killed at the hands of her husband who then kills himself on Pickett's advice. Like Meursault in Albert Camus' The Stranger, Pickett doesn't defend himself when accused of murder, and it's only when a new woman appears on the horizon that he feels his own life is worth saving. While addressing deeper issues about the meaning of existence and the possibilities of turning one's life around, McGuane weaves in plenty of comic relief, making absurdity and metaphysics seem as inextricable as Pickett and trouble. McGuane tests the limits of realism in this existential farce, and Driving on the Rim is a dark but jauntily oddball book.
