Train Dreams: A Novella [Kindle Edition]

Denis Johnson (Author)

Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

One of The Economist’s 2011 Books of the Year

One of NPR’s 10 Best Novels of 2011

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions.

Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—the new novella by the National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

 

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Tree of Smoke:

“Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book . . . It ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century.” —Jim Lewis, The New York Times

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of six novels, three collections of poetry, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke was the 2007 winner of the National Book Award.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 137 KB
• Print Length: 125 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: B005KO5YF2
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 30, 2011)
• Sold by: Macmillan
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004YD699A
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,989 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 101 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic storytelling of the American West August 30, 2011

By switterbug TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art--a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called "The Race." If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book's protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning--at least, he didn't know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

"The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully...and any bad thing might come of it."

And that was the signal incident--that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier's dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson's story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier's long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

"He was standing on a cliff...into a kind of arena enclosing...Spruce Lake...and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens."

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

"...when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth...It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart..."

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson's ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past--of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Elegaic and celebratory, Epic and small September 4, 2011

By Arthur Lewis

Format:Hardcover

I first read this as a short story in the O'Henry Prize stories anthology for 2003. It stayed with me then, and I was compelled to revisit it in this incarnation. (I haven't looked at the two versions closely enough to know what the differences are, but they don't seem to be great.)

So many images came to mind when reading this. I thought of the poet Jack Gilbert's description of Pittsburgh steel mills, of James Dickey's poem "The Sheep Child", of Bob Dylan's album Love & Theft, and of course, Thomas Hart Benton. The time when men did big things, when steam-powered locomotives groaned, and when the line between civilization and wilderness was still being formed.

Through the story of Robert Granier, Johnson describes this time in American history that was a bridge between a more primitive, agrarian time and modernity. There are bridges, too, between past and present, natural and supernatural, and paganism and Christianity.

We first see Granier, the story's main character,as a worker on a railroad bridge. The scale of both nature and the work the men do is grand, and is described with aching beauty by Johnson. Granier is an unusual main character, and despite his misfortunes, it's hard to feel a lot of empathy towards him. It doesn't matter, though, since the real main character of the story is the American northwest in the early 1900s. Viewing this time and place, through the Granier's eyes is effective, and there are many entertaining minor characters to help paint the picture. Granier's story is concluded shortly before the end of the novella, but the elegy for this period of time is the concern of the last paragraph, and its devastating last sentence.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Novella by National Book Award Winner Denis Johnson September 17, 2011

By Joseph Landes

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I thoroughly enjoyed Denis Johnson's novella--Train Dreams. The book takes you through a somewhat meandering tale of Robert Grainer who held various jobs in his mor ehtan 80-year old life. The ones most prominently described are his time as a logger in the woods east of Spokane, WA and his job later in life as a transporter of people and packages from place to place via horse and buggy. Grainer's wife and child die at an unfortunately young age and he ends up living life really very much on his own in what sort of feels to the reader although not totally described as such as a dilapidated shack on the same hallowed ground and his former residence. Some really excellent lines written by Johnson and specifically a great up and back between Grainer and a man he was transporting who after being shot was close to death. The book itself won't take you much more than a good sitting to complete and is well worth the time.

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.