Customer Reviews

Train Dreams: A Novella

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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.

Rather than spending 10-15 dollars on this book, which only contains "Train Dreams," I suggest picking up a copy of the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories instead, which contains "Train Dreams," as well as:

Table of Contents

The thing in the forest /A. S. Byatt
The shell collector /Anthony Doerr
Burn your maps /Robyn Joy Leff -- Lush /Bradford Morrow
God's goodness /Marjorie Kemper
Bleed blue in Indonesia /Adam Desnoyers
The story /Edith Pearlman
Swept away /T. Coraghessan Boyle
Meanwhile /Ann Harleman
Three days. a month. more. /Douglas Light
The high road /Joan Silber
Election eve /Evan S. Connell
Irish girl /Tim Johnston
What went wrong /Tim O'Brien
The American embassy /Chimamanda Nqozi Adichie
Kissing /William Kittredge
Sacred statues /William Trevor -- Two words /Molly Giles
Fathers /Alice Munro
Train dreams /Denis Johnson.

Plus, you can pick up the O. Henry used, for $0.01!!!!!! Trust me, buying the O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 is a much better deal than buying only ONE story out of the whole collection! Here's the link: [amazon won't let me post the link for some reason. But, just search "o. henry 2003" and it should come up. Good luck!]

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.

After reading thousands of books, it seems silly to me to call one a favorite. Though I've been a fan of Denis Johnson's work for a long time and think he's one of the best living writers, Train Dreams is possibly the most beautiful novel(la) I've ever read.

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.

at least most certainly in the rugged terrain of Idaho in the 1920s. Robert Grainier, a man in his mid-twenties who was delivered to his aunt's house off of a train at age six with only a note pinned to his clothes with no memory of his point of embarkation, is the author's stark voice in conveying this harsh environment.

This short book is not an ode to the pristine beauty of the raw lands of Idaho. Nature is a force to be overcome, even battled. Deep gorges must be spanned by bridges of such dubious construction that trains are sent across conductorless. Vast forests do not go easily as they are cleared. Trees fight back; they fall the wrong way with deadly consequences; silently falling branches can strike a deadly blow at any time. And forests burn, ferociously sweeping aside modest dwellings with family members often being eviscerated.

By his mid-thirties, Robert is man upon whom life has taken a great toll. His body is broken by his arduous days as a logger and his one chance at true love is abruptly and prematurely foreclosed by the indiscriminate forces of nature. In such an environment it is the ultimate folly to envision a life free from arbitrariness, both at the hands of nature and man. Robert perseveres, but his life has become more careful and reduced consisting of small, measured steps. He is left with dreams of his daughter and wolves to reconcile the cruelty that life has visited upon him.

Though the writing is somewhat patchy, this short book is powerful and haunting, but almost overwhelms. Few characters appear and all seem to be operating in a fast current of inevitability. Human resourcefulness can operate only along the edges of a minimally understood design. One suspects that the author is after far more than an elegiac story of the early 20th century.

Nearly every year I recommend to my friends one (usually it's only one)extraordinary book I've come across that year. In recent years, it was Zeitoun one, Let the Great World Spin another year; Junot Diaz' Oscar Wao when it was published. I have just read Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, and have now e-mailed my reading friends. Although by no means what is called a "suspense" novel. it had me on the edge of my seat, it was that riveting. It reminded me a bit of Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall in particular), and even Hemingway. It's very short, so on a words per buck basis may not be good "value", but there is not a wrong, misplaced, superfluous, or valueless word among them. The fine poet Yusuf Komunyaakaa wonders, in one of his poems, "how Count Basie [the great minimalist] knew what to leave out". The same applies here. It's strong stuff but will leave you breathless.

I have read some of this author's works. Most recently, JESUS'SON--which is probably one of the best short story collections I've read in years. So I was intrigued to see this slim novella listed here at Amazon.

Firstly, there's something so pure and timeless in the telling of this tale; it's almost as if I walked back in time, and aptly so, since it does take place in another era. But the author encapsulates the time-period so well, in details I wouldn't normally think of: as in how people talked back then, in an era where there was no electronic media whatsoever. So this had me reading along, and definitely made the story worthwhile. A short piece, but powerful in its beautiful rendering. A refreshingly different read for these times.

"Maybe one or two people wondered what drew him back to this hard-to-reach spot, but Grainier never cared to tell. The truth was he'd vowed to stay, and he'd been shocked into making this vow by something that happened about ten years after the region had burned.

This was in the two or three days after Kootenai Bob had been killed under a train, while his tribe still toured the tracks searching out the bits of him. On these three or four crisp autumn evenings, the Great Northern train blew a series of long ones, sounding off from the Meadow Creek crossing until it was well north, proceeding slowly through the area on orders from the management, who wanted to give the Kootenai tribe a chance to collect what they could of their brother without further disarrangement.

It was mid-November, but it hadn't yet snowed. The moon rose near midnight and hung above Queen Mountain as late as ten in the morning. The days were brief and bright, the nights clear and cold. And yet the nights were full of a raucous hysteria.

These nights, the whistle got the coyotes started, and then the wolves. His companion the red dog was out there, too--Grainier hadn't seen her for days. The chorus seemed the fullest the night the moon came full. Seemed the maddest. The most pitiable.

The wolves and coyotes howled without letup all night, sounding in the hundreds, more than Grainier had ever heard, and maybe other creatures too, owls, eagles--what, exactly, he couldn't guess--surely every single animal with a voice along the peaks and ridges looking down on the Moyea River, as if nothing could ease any of God's beasts. Grainier didn't dare to sleep, feeling it all to be some sort of vast pronouncement, maybe the alarms of the end of the world."

I've been reading and re-reading this fiercely lyrical little saga for a couple of weeks now and am still wholly unable to convey in my own words the sense of wonder I feel in the presence of Denis Johnson's stunningly wrought sentences. Hence the lengthy quote here will have to serve in place of my feeble efforts--I wish to God I could quote the whole dang thing but copyright laws and what not I suppose. Any road it's probably best in exceptional circumstances like these to excuse oneself entirely and simply let the dude speak for himself: the passages above are especially dear to me on account of they form the pitch-perfect preamable to one of the very high points in the whole captivating story when that something that happened to Robert Grainier ten years after the Moyea Valley fire is just brilliantly and memorably recounted. Seriously, I wish I could quote the whole farking thing. Train Dreams is that good.

Deeply evocative of frontier life. Unsentimental, intensely romantic, and at just over 100 pages, one of the easiest recommendations I'll ever make.