Train Dreams (original 2002; edition 2006)

Evocation of a time and place so strong, it's hard to forget. I can still smell the ash. This is a crystal clear little piece of sparse poetic prose that packs a punch first, and lingers afterwards.

It shows us the life of a lonely man; a man who is forced to be lonely by circumstance, but then makes it a part of himself - his strength. There's a strong sense of his lifelong pain dulled and lived with. But it is not a sad book. It's not even bleak. It's full of character and individuality. It's also well seasoned with the kind of 'yarns' one meets with in the wide open spaces, like the one about the man who gets shot by his own dog. But nothing gratuitous. All paced and arranged with a perfect sense of poetic timing.

It's the quality of the prose that makes this little book so good. There's nothing overtly fancy in it. It's simple and sparse. But its overall effect is powerful and beautiful. This is a true novella; it has all its dimensions exactly right. I'm left wanting to read more like it - but you know what? I don't think there is anything else like it.

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul
~ William Blake, from "Auguries of Innocence"

A novella scarcely 100 pages on half-sized leaves, finished in little more than an hour, Train Dreams hauls boxcars of story that could fully load the most epic of tomes. Train Dreams is an epic yet terse tome tracking the eccentric lifetime of Robert Grainier from rustic outpost to wilderness depot. The cadence of Train Dreams over precipitous trestles and into tunnels keeps time to the timelessness of Grainier's memories and not the predictability of clocks, so that we know Grainier the railroad builder before we know him as an orphan; know the happy short-lived family man after the long-time hermit. We see the caboose quite often before the engine. Grainier's jobs seem to converge and become the singular preoccupations in his life, be it freight carrier or logger, salvager or log cabin architect, and memories (or were they dreams?) lingered in Grainier's consciousness. Despite its brevity, Train Dreams is no bullion cube of a book. It's chateaubriand. It communicates more not because of but in spite of conveying less. So maybe it is the microscopic mass of William Blake's "grain of sand" -- so what? Watch Denis Johnson make of it a world.

Credit Denis Johnson's nonchalant style, his miniaturist's skills (he is also a poet, and it shows), who wrought each day of Grainier's life to make them count. Made each day count the way the best poetry makes each phoneme count. Frugal, but not a poor man's prose. Granted, Johnson chose but a baker's dozen or so of Grainier's days to illuminate, but he chose the most poignant of his days. Milestone days or crossroad days when Grainier, a wanderer of the northwest, understandably let his losses determine course. Hard cargo he carried, not easily turned. Grief haunted him, but he remained busy in his solitude (not discounting his nightly howling ritual with packs of wolves) deep in the lonesome woods, and it helped him maintain some levity, some sanity, commiserating his existence with those wild though faithful hounds. Being preoccupied by his memories indistinguishable from his dreams, Grainier pretended not to notice the omnipresent heartache of the past gnawing on him. Train Dreams, thankfully, avoids the tragic melodrama of a made-for-TV train wreck because it's as tranquil as it is painful, and it does not blow smoke off even an inch of sentimental rails.

There's one day in Train Dreams that's stuck with me the most. The day in 1917 when Robert Grainier, after nearly helping hurl a thieving "Chinaman" off a railroad bridge fifty feet above the Moyea River in Idaho's panhandle, walked two miles out of his way on his commute home from hard labor, to buy a bottle of Hood's Sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, whom he'd not seen in weeks. She was home in their idyllic meadow cabin nursing their four-month-old, Kate. Idyllic, that is, until Grainier's baby girl "did not seem to recognize him." As that ominous day lapsed seamlessly into years, and the random conflagrations of fate seared a bewildering estrangement between daughter and father that was the fault of neither, enter the unexpected forepaws of a fable and hind feet of a myth, that, thanks to Denis Johnson's imaginative gifts, crept aboard Train Dreams and helped it levitate off the tracks. ( )

"I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there weren't no shade."

1917, America's Northwest, amidst the unforgiving nature of working in the woods -- felling trees, building bridges, laying railroads.

Robert Graineer, a man without known parents or home, untroubled by the shifts of the history and the big world, honest and dignified, as brought up by his uncle and aunt. He is poor, and when out at work he is sustained by his profound love for his wife and infant daughter.

It is a short book but Johnson plays a trick on you, it magically fits in it more than such a modest volume can strictly contain.

For me this book was a triumph of style over plot. But I might have been tripped by overblown expectations from the reviews, it is sometimes best for a book if people just arrive at it, unguided and blank. ( )

A difficult read. It fehlt very melancholy for me, though it was told with some kind of distance. ( )

A gritty story about the life of a man who grows up in the Northwest, loses a great deal in the 1910 fire which swept across Idaho, Montana and Washington. I don't want to say too much but I will say that Johnson made real for me the cost of that fire. ( )