By Denis Johnson
New York, Picador, 2002
116 pages Novella
Once in a while a book affects you in profound ways. Such
was my experience reading Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Written as a story for
the Paris Review in 2002, when it won the O’Henry Award, the story has just recently been printed as a
hard copy novella, and it was shortlisted for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. If you
will recall, no Pulitzer Prize was given for fiction this year. So, being
shortlisted is just as good as winning.
Grainier is a man of the West in the early years of the 20th
century. He works at all kinds of odd jobs, lives in the woods, and is, at
heart, the loneliest of men. “Grainier had also once seen a wonder horse, and a
wolf-boy, and he’d flown in the air in a biplane in 1927. He’d started his life
story on a train ride he couldn’t remember, and ended up standing around
outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.”
Grainier is a Christian man, a Methodist, in prohibition
Idaho. He works on the railroad, chops wood, and does all sorts of other odd
jobs all his life. When he is in his 30s, he builds a small cabin on a small
piece of land and marries a young woman who soon bears him a daughter. Because
he isn’t used to having people around, he leaves his wife and baby often, and
in the pivotal experience in his life, the cabin and his family is consumed in
a forest fire while he is away.
After that experience, he becomes one of those people who
live on the fringe of society; one of those people who are just around. You
know them but then, again, you don’t. Johnson says that Grainier was “a man of
whom it might have been said, but nothing was ever said of him, that he had
little to interest him.”
The reader of Train Dreams knows him, and our hearts
break for his loneliness, for his isolation, and for his loss. However, all is
not heaviness with Grainier. He has an interesting perspective on the ways in
which the West is changing; how he sees the changes is very different from the
way we view those changes from our perspective nearly 100 years later. One of
my favorite stories in the book is when he is operating a livery service and
takes a man who had been shot by a dog (yes I wrote that right) to the
hospital. His exchange with the wounded man is more than humorous, it is
outright funny. Also very funny is the tale about the time he took a biplane
ride.
The most magnificent part of Train Dreams is how concise it
is. There is not a wasted word, and yet in its sparseness, it is profound.The reviewer in The New Yorker says: “Clean, American
simplicity in prose is easy to mimic and hard to make. The New York Times reviewer says that is the
beauty of the book. The paucity of the words makes it all the more dynamic. He
also says: “The novella also accumulates power because Johnson is as skilled as
ever at balancing menace against ecstasy, civilization against wilderness. His
prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity, and beneath all of the
novella’s best moments, Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat
of violence.”
Train Dreams is a short one to two hour read, and as I thought about
Grainier, I kept thinking, “I know this man.” Then I realized that I had been
thinking about my Uncle Harry all the way through the book. Uncle Harry was a
World War One veteran, a silent man who spent his life in Seattle working as a desk clerk in
a men's hotel. I never met him until he retired and moved back to Minnesota to
live with his sister, my Grandma. Did we ever get to know him? Probably not. For
all the years he lived with my Grandma, all I ever knew about him was that he
liked to watch wrestling on television, and he put sugar on everything,
including tomatoes and macaroni and cheese. I would guess that he suffered from
PTSD from the war, which was not diagnosable at that time, of course. Uncle
Harry lived to be 100 and remains a mysterious figure in my life.
Denis Johnson is one of America’s most prominent novelists,
the winner of the National Book Award. He was a new author to me, and I want to
read another one of his books
.
The review in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/09/05/110905crbo_books_wood#ixzz29m5Eb4oA
Here is the review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/books/review/train-dreams-by-denis-johnson-book-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A reader’s discussion on the Diane Rehm Show: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-05-23/readers-review-train-dreams-denis-johnson
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