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My name is Berl Pickett, Dr. Berl Pickett. But I sign checks and documents “I. B. Pickett,” and this requires some explanation. My very forceful mother, a patriot and evangelical Christian, named me after the author of “God Bless America”; so, I am Irving Berlin Pickett and well aware of the absurdity of my name. My father wanted Lefty Frizzell Pickett. That would have been worse. In any case, my very name illustrates the borrowed nature of my life, not easily denied. In fact, I’ve learned to enjoy my circumstances as I have moved among people trapped in their homes, jobs, and families—and their names! My esteemed colleague Alan Hirsch, mountaineer and cardiologist, calls me Irving, with a chuckle. When I first arrived at our clinic from the Indian Health Service, Dr. Hirsch told me that I couldn’t call myself a physician until I had delivered babies to ambivalent parents or taught the old to accept their grotesque new faces. I don’t know about that, but I do abide in the conviction that I’ve come a long way, and lately I’ve wondered how this all happened.
L. Raymond Hoxey bought an old mansion in Livingston, Montana, and converted the third floor into a delightful apartment with a view of the Absaroka Mountains. The second floor housed his print collection in archival conditions, with humidifiers and air-quality equipment. The first floor was divided into two smaller but still comfortable apartments, one of which was home to his assistant, Tessa Larionov, and the other, in summer, to a textile historian employed by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who was also a trout fisherman.
The year the historian died, I was still in pre-med and painting houses to support myself; I moved into his vacated apartment. Acknowledging that there is a difference between being naive and being innocent, I will say that I was entirely naive. My parents lived a few miles away, but we weren’t getting along and I needed some distance, despite the fact that my mother was sick and often ranted about God. There are many versions of God around the world, but my mother’s was definitely a guy, and a mean one. Like many aspiring to study medicine, I planned to get rich but I wasn’t rich yet; I was just a poor house painter—out of work and looking for whatever came along—and despite all other evidence, I feared that I would be one forever, packing a great wheel of color chips from one indifferent house to another. I don’t mean to suggest mild insecurity here: by any reasonable standard, I was losing my mind.
Tessa Larionov was the daughter of a Russian engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1953 and found his way to Montana, where he set up business building bridges for the railroad. His offices were in Choteau, where Tessa was born and grew up. Tessa’s mother was not Russian; her father had met her in New Jersey, where he first landed. She may have been Italian. Tessa was a powerfully built but attractive woman, with black hair, black eyes, and the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous. She was liked by everyone who knew her. Trained in library science, she had worked as an archivist at some very august places, including the Huntington, in Pasadena, where she’d met her future employer and our landlord, L. Raymond Hoxey, who had let Tessa talk him into retiring to Montana to run his rare-prints business with her help. Hoxey was eighty-one years old, and his arrangement with Tessa was a means of avoiding assisted living. She was very fond of him and had wanted to go home to Montana, and so it worked for both of them. Tessa was exactly thirty, still single, though she had enjoyed an active love life, leaving in her wake only grateful hearts, or so she said. “They’re all still crazy about me,” she told me. “That’s why I left California.” Settling down was of no interest; she’d grown absorbed with the prints, and she wanted to keep her eye on Hoxey. I was twenty, but she treated me as if I were even younger—a salute to my retarded behavior.
My father had worked briefly as a pipe fitter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the course of corporate takeovers, the railroad had actually changed its name several times, but Northern Pacific was the one that stuck in all our minds. It meant something. Burlington Northern meant nothing. Then he had a little stock farm he liked to call a ranch, whose main purpose was to let him keep horses. But he lost it to the bank and went to work for the post office. My mother was a hairdresser and, because of her big mouth and religious mania, had enemies all over southwestern Montana and very few customers. During my childhood, they had had a traveling rug-cleaning business, and the three of us saw most of the West as we towed the steamer behind our van, an old-fashioned Steam Jenny with an oil-filled crankcase and a picture of a Vargas-type girl in black nylons emblazoned on its side—wonderful years, really. As an only child, I was all but homeschooled, then run back and forth between our house and the less fashionable of the two grade schools, before going to the local high school, where I was anonymous, never having been allowed by my overprotective mother to learn a sport. My mother joined one Pentecostal church after another, followed by my father, whose skepticism had long ago evaporated in the heat of her enthusiasm; they stopped just short of snake handling. But I liked to fish; I’d fish wherever there was water, and I fished in a lot of ditches where there was no hope of success. I now understand that I was for my age a weirdly underdeveloped human being, ripe for the sort of encounter I had with Tessa Larionov. Even my mother noticed my immaturity; she was always telling me, “Stop staring at people!” But she had once given me a gift beyond price: looking down at me when I was a little boy, she said, “You’re an old soul. You’ve been here before.”
It was Hoxey whom I got to know first. The day I arranged to rent from him, he happened to have received several Reginald Marsh prints, of which he was very proud and which he wanted me to see. I acted like I’d heard of Reginald Marsh. I didn’t know one painter from another, but I had a hunger for this sort of information; I felt it would be useful later, when I was rich. Hoxey was a pleasant old man who must have once been very fat, because he had loose flesh hanging from him everywhere and as many as seven chins. I always tried to count them while he was speaking to me, but then something in his remarks would break my concentration. This physicality, which bespoke a lifetime of phlegmatic living, gave his discourse on prints the authority of a weathered desert rat holding forth on cactus. I remember him carefully unpacking one of the prints—a kind of crazy thing with blank-faced people swarming in and out of doorways, none of them reacting to anyone else. Hoxey said that it was the calmest Reginald Marsh he’d ever seen. “No ‘Moonlight and Pretzels’ in this one!” he cried. I could see both that he’d be an agreeable landlord and that many health issues lay before him. As someone aspiring to be a doctor, I could make a little game of guessing which one would kill him.
Tessa asked me over one night for drinks. She had done a beautiful job of making her apartment habitable, with comfortable old furniture that she’d bought cheap and upholstered. She also had a good many of Hoxey’s prints on loan, though, as she explained, she was really just storing them, and her collection changed as things were sold from Hoxey’s inventory. She made a little face when she told me that she couldn’t afford to get attached to any of the prints, quite a trial for her, as she loved the art of all nations. Cocktails and art, I thought; maybe I’ll get into her pants. I’m sure that at the time I had a big goober smile on my face as I contemplated such an outcome. Tessa said I reminded her of Li’l Abner.
“Because I work upstairs, I’ve had to become a walker just to get outside,” she said, making our drinks in a blender. “You start getting curious about different neighborhoods—where the railroaders lived, where the ranchers retired, where the doctors and bankers lived. In the winter, when the wind is up, I have to tie a scarf over my face. Anybody you see in the street is ducking for a building, kind of like in the Blitz.”
As I waited for my drink, I found myself leaning forward in my chair with my hands pressed between my knees. It was only when she stopped to look at me that I realized my posture was strange. I pretended that I was just stretching and leaned back in an apparently casual but quite uncomfortable position. As Tessa came toward me with a brightly colored drink, both she and it seemed to be expanding, and when she handed me the drink I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to hold it. I felt suddenly that everything was bigger than me, that I was in over my head, trying to handle a situation which, when I was rich, I would take to like a duck to water. But things settled down quickly as soon as she returned to her seat, and I was then glad to have the drink because I was a bit cotton-mouthed. I had gone from my first impulse of getting into her pants to fearing that she’d try to get into mine.
I was not much of a drinker; water would have served as well. That summer I’d made an experimental foray into a local bar, feeling that I needed to learn to be more social. I struck up a conversation with a somber middle-aged fellow in a rumpled suit. He looked so gloomy that I regaled him with what I felt were uplifting accounts of my struggles at school. He stared at me for a while, until I sensed that all the timing was disappearing from my delivery. Finally he said, “Hey, boss, I got to go. You’re creeping me out.”
“Now,” Tessa said, “let&rsqu...
Revue de presse :
My name is Berl Pickett, Dr. Berl Pickett. But I sign checks and documents “I. B. Pickett,” and this requires some explanation. My very forceful mother, a patriot and evangelical Christian, named me after the author of “God Bless America”; so, I am Irving Berlin Pickett and well aware of the absurdity of my name. My father wanted Lefty Frizzell Pickett. That would have been worse. In any case, my very name illustrates the borrowed nature of my life, not easily denied. In fact, I’ve learned to enjoy my circumstances as I have moved among people trapped in their homes, jobs, and families—and their names! My esteemed colleague Alan Hirsch, mountaineer and cardiologist, calls me Irving, with a chuckle. When I first arrived at our clinic from the Indian Health Service, Dr. Hirsch told me that I couldn’t call myself a physician until I had delivered babies to ambivalent parents or taught the old to accept their grotesque new faces. I don’t know about that, but I do abide in the conviction that I’ve come a long way, and lately I’ve wondered how this all happened.
L. Raymond Hoxey bought an old mansion in Livingston, Montana, and converted the third floor into a delightful apartment with a view of the Absaroka Mountains. The second floor housed his print collection in archival conditions, with humidifiers and air-quality equipment. The first floor was divided into two smaller but still comfortable apartments, one of which was home to his assistant, Tessa Larionov, and the other, in summer, to a textile historian employed by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who was also a trout fisherman.
The year the historian died, I was still in pre-med and painting houses to support myself; I moved into his vacated apartment. Acknowledging that there is a difference between being naive and being innocent, I will say that I was entirely naive. My parents lived a few miles away, but we weren’t getting along and I needed some distance, despite the fact that my mother was sick and often ranted about God. There are many versions of God around the world, but my mother’s was definitely a guy, and a mean one. Like many aspiring to study medicine, I planned to get rich but I wasn’t rich yet; I was just a poor house painter—out of work and looking for whatever came along—and despite all other evidence, I feared that I would be one forever, packing a great wheel of color chips from one indifferent house to another. I don’t mean to suggest mild insecurity here: by any reasonable standard, I was losing my mind.
Tessa Larionov was the daughter of a Russian engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1953 and found his way to Montana, where he set up business building bridges for the railroad. His offices were in Choteau, where Tessa was born and grew up. Tessa’s mother was not Russian; her father had met her in New Jersey, where he first landed. She may have been Italian. Tessa was a powerfully built but attractive woman, with black hair, black eyes, and the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous. She was liked by everyone who knew her. Trained in library science, she had worked as an archivist at some very august places, including the Huntington, in Pasadena, where she’d met her future employer and our landlord, L. Raymond Hoxey, who had let Tessa talk him into retiring to Montana to run his rare-prints business with her help. Hoxey was eighty-one years old, and his arrangement with Tessa was a means of avoiding assisted living. She was very fond of him and had wanted to go home to Montana, and so it worked for both of them. Tessa was exactly thirty, still single, though she had enjoyed an active love life, leaving in her wake only grateful hearts, or so she said. “They’re all still crazy about me,” she told me. “That’s why I left California.” Settling down was of no interest; she’d grown absorbed with the prints, and she wanted to keep her eye on Hoxey. I was twenty, but she treated me as if I were even younger—a salute to my retarded behavior.
My father had worked briefly as a pipe fitter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the course of corporate takeovers, the railroad had actually changed its name several times, but Northern Pacific was the one that stuck in all our minds. It meant something. Burlington Northern meant nothing. Then he had a little stock farm he liked to call a ranch, whose main purpose was to let him keep horses. But he lost it to the bank and went to work for the post office. My mother was a hairdresser and, because of her big mouth and religious mania, had enemies all over southwestern Montana and very few customers. During my childhood, they had had a traveling rug-cleaning business, and the three of us saw most of the West as we towed the steamer behind our van, an old-fashioned Steam Jenny with an oil-filled crankcase and a picture of a Vargas-type girl in black nylons emblazoned on its side—wonderful years, really. As an only child, I was all but homeschooled, then run back and forth between our house and the less fashionable of the two grade schools, before going to the local high school, where I was anonymous, never having been allowed by my overprotective mother to learn a sport. My mother joined one Pentecostal church after another, followed by my father, whose skepticism had long ago evaporated in the heat of her enthusiasm; they stopped just short of snake handling. But I liked to fish; I’d fish wherever there was water, and I fished in a lot of ditches where there was no hope of success. I now understand that I was for my age a weirdly underdeveloped human being, ripe for the sort of encounter I had with Tessa Larionov. Even my mother noticed my immaturity; she was always telling me, “Stop staring at people!” But she had once given me a gift beyond price: looking down at me when I was a little boy, she said, “You’re an old soul. You’ve been here before.”
It was Hoxey whom I got to know first. The day I arranged to rent from him, he happened to have received several Reginald Marsh prints, of which he was very proud and which he wanted me to see. I acted like I’d heard of Reginald Marsh. I didn’t know one painter from another, but I had a hunger for this sort of information; I felt it would be useful later, when I was rich. Hoxey was a pleasant old man who must have once been very fat, because he had loose flesh hanging from him everywhere and as many as seven chins. I always tried to count them while he was speaking to me, but then something in his remarks would break my concentration. This physicality, which bespoke a lifetime of phlegmatic living, gave his discourse on prints the authority of a weathered desert rat holding forth on cactus. I remember him carefully unpacking one of the prints—a kind of crazy thing with blank-faced people swarming in and out of doorways, none of them reacting to anyone else. Hoxey said that it was the calmest Reginald Marsh he’d ever seen. “No ‘Moonlight and Pretzels’ in this one!” he cried. I could see both that he’d be an agreeable landlord and that many health issues lay before him. As someone aspiring to be a doctor, I could make a little game of guessing which one would kill him.
Tessa asked me over one night for drinks. She had done a beautiful job of making her apartment habitable, with comfortable old furniture that she’d bought cheap and upholstered. She also had a good many of Hoxey’s prints on loan, though, as she explained, she was really just storing them, and her collection changed as things were sold from Hoxey’s inventory. She made a little face when she told me that she couldn’t afford to get attached to any of the prints, quite a trial for her, as she loved the art of all nations. Cocktails and art, I thought; maybe I’ll get into her pants. I’m sure that at the time I had a big goober smile on my face as I contemplated such an outcome. Tessa said I reminded her of Li’l Abner.
“Because I work upstairs, I’ve had to become a walker just to get outside,” she said, making our drinks in a blender. “You start getting curious about different neighborhoods—where the railroaders lived, where the ranchers retired, where the doctors and bankers lived. In the winter, when the wind is up, I have to tie a scarf over my face. Anybody you see in the street is ducking for a building, kind of like in the Blitz.”
As I waited for my drink, I found myself leaning forward in my chair with my hands pressed between my knees. It was only when she stopped to look at me that I realized my posture was strange. I pretended that I was just stretching and leaned back in an apparently casual but quite uncomfortable position. As Tessa came toward me with a brightly colored drink, both she and it seemed to be expanding, and when she handed me the drink I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to hold it. I felt suddenly that everything was bigger than me, that I was in over my head, trying to handle a situation which, when I was rich, I would take to like a duck to water. But things settled down quickly as soon as she returned to her seat, and I was then glad to have the drink because I was a bit cotton-mouthed. I had gone from my first impulse of getting into her pants to fearing that she’d try to get into mine.
I was not much of a drinker; water would have served as well. That summer I’d made an experimental foray into a local bar, feeling that I needed to learn to be more social. I struck up a conversation with a somber middle-aged fellow in a rumpled suit. He looked so gloomy that I regaled him with what I felt were uplifting accounts of my struggles at school. He stared at me for a while, until I sensed that all the timing was disappearing from my delivery. Finally he said, “Hey, boss, I got to go. You’re creeping me out.”
“Now,” Tessa said, “let&rsqu...
praise for Thomas McGuane’s DRIVING ON THE RIM
“Pickett is like a cowboy Candide....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 [his] enduring charms.... With effortless accuracy he captures the peccadilloes of small-town life...He sketches the supporting cast of often lunatic denizens with ribald humor and affection. [With] an old-timer’s sense of fatalistic resignation [McGuane] can still uncork sentences full of cowboy poetry and beguiling rhythms, but beneath the jaunty tone and skewed plotting now runs a strong streak of melancholy and an offhand yet persistent moral fervor.... The outdoor scenes are lyrical...and the book’s denouement...achieves something close to hard-won grandeur.”
Michael Lindgren, Washington Post
“[P]owerful.... McGuane...play[s] out some thorny moral dilemmas within the confines of a simple character, a regular guy.... McGuane has long been forming unforgettable people out of the dust and dirt of the country he knows best—characters that just get fuller and richer and less predictable.... Dry as a bone, continually surprised (and delighted) by humanity. This is what makes [the hero] Berl so memorable and Driving on the Rim such a pleasure to read. McGuane has invested his tale with buoyancy reminiscent of John Irving—his way of veering off plot into the magical, even the surreal....It’s uplifting to think that an author can dive this far into human nature and come out smiling.”
Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“[P]artly picaresque....partly about the collision of the Old West and the New....[Driving on the Rim is] irrepressibly comic and optimistic even when it verges on the tragic.”
Charles McGrath, New York Times
“McGuane is as good as ever on the redeeming aspects of a troubled country ... [T]he rambling plot is sustained because the individual episodes are a pleasure, often farcical and always acutely observed, and because the hero is sympathetic in his dissociated journey.”
Maile Meloy, New York Times Book Review
“The rambling plot of McGuane’s novel is held together by its pleasurable, acutely observed episodes, and by the sardonic Montana doctor at its center, sympathetic in his dissociated journey.”
Editor’s Choice, New York Times Book Review
“Driving on the Rim...represents a triumphant deepening of [McGuane’s] vision....[and] may also be McGuane’s funniest novel, absurdist in an inimitably American way. Without sufficient notice, the writer has become one of this country’s greatest comic novelists, right up there with Mark Twain.”
Will Blythe, Men’s Journal
“Driving on the Rim shows McGuane at his best, expertly quilting together the sacred and the profane, the comic and the tragic.... McGuane writes lovingly of the land. Few writers have such a deft touch with language and Driving on the Rim should be read aloud and savored....excellent.”
William McKeen, Boston Globe
“[Driving on the Rim] delivers some of [McGuane’s] finest writing....[his] prose is as clean and crackling as ever....Few writers conjure landscape as well as McGuane....The fact that he can also write in the high-elegiac mode, with a profoundly poetic voice, only enhances his status as one of our finest prose stylists.”
William Porter, The Denver Post
“A chapter into Thomas McGuane’s latest novel, I found myself thinking, not for the first time, that no living American novelist provides greater pleasure—sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page—than this Montana icon. A voice of ‘60s counterculture, he has grown into a chronicler of contemporary life for all cultures and generations: dashingly satirical, armed with a stealthy humanist streak, possessed of deep melancholic insight and unsurpassed in defining our inner lives against the mighty backdrop of God’s green Earth.... This upwardly mobile, picaresque novel rolls through offbeat characters and odd incidents, gathering emotion and insight as it goes.... It’s a tribute to McGuane...that he shares those hopes with the rest of us, and makes us feel them just as strongly.”
Lloyd Sachs, Chicago Sun-Times
“Driving on the Rim is full of lovely little moments...shrewd observations, funny one-liners, and memorable quotes that beg to be repeated. The novel’s picaresque format, sprawling topics, and unusually detached narrative style give it an old-fashioned feel, but its ironic self-commentary marks it as undeniably contemporary.”
Norah Piehl, Book Reporter
“McGuane’s delightful use of words...the way he encapsulates a character with one compact sentence...and his sharp insight into the human condition [form this] dark picaresque.... Driving on the Rim does more than deliver a story. It demonstrates McGuane’s remarkable ability to create and then untangle multiple plotlines, bringing us, once again, to wonder at his ability to create uniquely hilarious characters that yet remind us so much of ourselves.”
Cherie Newman, High Country News
“[F]unny and thoughtful....filled with striking sentences...and observations about human nature.... McGuane’s new novel is one to ramble through slowly and savor.”
Jenny Shank, New West Book Review
“[A]t root, this is a novel about science and faith, life and death. The endlessly quotable McGuane...explores all this in a deadpan vernacular that is all the more profound for its matter-of-factness. And [his protagonist, I.B.] Picket, an outsider in his own small town, is a fascinating character who calls to mind some of the great literary iconoclasts....A marvelous book, funny, elegiac, and profound, from a clear-eyed observer of modern life.”
Booklist (starred review)
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- ÉditeurSound Library
- Date d'édition2010
- ISBN 10 0792774396
- ISBN 13 9780792774396
- ReliureCD
- Evaluation vendeur
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