I spoke with award-winning novelist, Western writer and screenwriter Thomas McGuane Saturday about his new novel, “Driving on the Rim” and his appearance Wednesday at California Lectures.

“Driving on the Rim” is the story of guy growing up in small town, Montana. His upbringing does little to prepare him for adult life. He could have easily gone nowhere if not for the guidance of a kindly old doctor who takes him fishing and hunting and encourages him to attend medical school. We meet him as he begins to experience a major life crisis.

SP: Robert Birnbaum speaking with you in 2002 about your then-new novel, “The Cadence of Grass” asked you, “So why did you write a novel?” You replied, “I didn’t write one until I felt strongly about some things.” Are there things that led you to write “Driving on the Rim”?

TM: I wanted to write about someone who is compassionate but out of control [and about how] the apple often falls far from the tree.

I rarely write in the first person, [but] this is a fictional biography.

 ***

McGuane agreed that there are three main themes running through “Driving on the Rim.” One, the impact of natural surrounding. Small-town life and small-mindedness is second. The third is sex. A lot about sex.

His central character, Irving Berlin ("Berl") Pickett, MD, shares McGuane’s love of his natural surroundings, retreating into the natural environment and especially fishing.

SP: How does the natural environment affect how you see yourself?

TM: I am a secular person with a spiritual craving. I am influenced by the Gospel of Thomas and the cosmology of the Plains Indians.

SP: In terms of small towns and small minds, does Berl feel in some ways like an outsider both in the town he grew up in and the medical clinic he works in?

TM: He never fit in wherever he went. [It is] seeing small towns from an alien distance. World War II changed mating patterns.

 ***

He continued talking about how up to the war people dated folks that always had been around them. During and after the war folks were meeting, dating and marrying people from all over. This shook up things in small towns.

He also talked about the phenomenon that both for the town and for the clinic that this may be a strange or oddball person, but they are our oddball.

Berl is raised by a hardcore Pentecostal mother but is introduced to all sorts of sex at a young age by her sister, runs off to Key West for a sex-filled vacation with the wife of the man who housed him during college and spends much of his time thinking about sex when he isn’t practicing it, which is often.

SP: The sex? Are Berl’s sex experiences outside norms? Why does sex come so easily for him?

TM:[ He] falls into his life willy-nilly. [He is] quixotic in life’s niceties. [He lacks] societal imposed inhibitions. A Candide.

***

We talked about how as I read the book I kept dreading that something truly awful was going to happen to Berl, being influenced by reading western short story writer Anne Proux (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Them Old Cowboy Songs”). McGuane said he "was glad that this fatalistic period of Western fiction was going out of fashion.”

SP: Finally, about the title. I knew that it could be about a couple of things. I envisioned a canyon with the unknown over the rim.

TM: I like the ambiguity of it. It is about driving on a wheel rim from a flat tire.

There is a Montana saying about the moon of schnapps and jumper cables. On a cold Montana night, coming out from a night of drinking and finding a flat tire many a Montanan would just drive home on the rim.

California Lectures presents: THOMAS MCGUANE In conversation with Pam Houston
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 Wednesday April 6, 2011
Crest Theatre | 7:30 p.m.Lecture

Preview | Crest Theatre | 6:30-7:00 p.m.
Steve Cook CSUS

Thomas McGuane photo: NNDB  Montana photos;  courtsey MontanaPictures.net Town photo is Livingston Montana home to Bur Pickett MD
 

Editorial note:  The date of this lecture has been changed since publication