Train dreams

Review by New York Times Review

SOMETIMES, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. Your blood quickens, the clouds stretch, the light turns everything to gold and something enters you, shakes you, seizes some root of your soul and pulps it. Maybe you make your way down to the lake for a swim, or just sit beneath the sky for an hour, dazzled, but what lasts is the feeling that you have found something important, something precious, something that would be world-renowned if only it weren't so hard to find. It's a proprietary feeling, too, when you find a place - or a song, or a painting, or a sandwich - that you love, that moves you. You want to share it with only a few other souls, believers, maniacs, folks who won't trample on it. Because who wants to see her sacred meadow flattened by the sandals of tourists? I first read Denis Johnson's novella "Train Dreams" in a bright orange 2002 issue of The Paris Review and felt that old thrill of discovery. The story concerns the life of Robert Grainier, a fictional orphan shipped by train in 1893 into the woods of the Idaho panhandle. He grows up, works on logging gangs, falls in love, and loses his wife and baby daughter to a particularly pernicious wildfire. What Johnson builds from the ashes of Grainier's life is a tender, lonesome and riveting story, an American epic writ small, in which Grainier drives a horse cart, flies in a biplane, takes part in occasionally hilarious exchanges and goes maybe 42 percent crazy. It's a love story, a hermit's story and a refashioning of age-old wolf-based folklore like "Little Red Cap." It's also a small masterpiece. You look up from the thing dazed, slightly changed. Every once in a while, over the ensuing nine years, I'd page through that Paris Review and try to understand how Johnson had made such a quietly compelling thing. Part of it, of course, is atmosphere. Johnson's evocation of Prohibition Idaho is totally persuasive. Grainier occupies a universe of "large old four-shot black powder revolvers" and "six-horse teams" and "jim-crack sawyers," and Johnson's dialogue is full of folksy plausibilities. In his youth, Grainier is witness and party to the great subjugation of the American West; he works on railroad trestles, sleds out giant trees and finds himself "hungry to be around other such massive undertakings, where swarms of men did away with portions of the forest and assembled structures as big as anything going." 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. "The wolves and coyotes howled without letup all night," he writes, "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." In all the paragraphs of "Train Dreams," one feels vaguely unsettled; one feels the seams of history might unravel at any moment and the legends of the woods come slipping through. The novella has flaws, of course: tufts of seemingly irrelevant material stick out here and there, miscellaneous fevers, peripheral anecdotes, a Chinese deportation, a big kid with a weak heart. But its imperfections somehow make the experience better, more real, more absorbing, and it might be the most powerful thing Johnson has ever written. But I've decided now, after thinking it over for almost a decade, that what ultimately gives "Train Dreams" its power is simpler. It is the story's brevity. The novella runs 116 pages, and you can turn all of those pages in 90 minutes. In that hour and a half the whole crimped, swirling, haunted life of Robert Grainier rattles through the forests of your mind like the whistle of the Spokane International he hears so often in his dreams. In an 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice Told Tales," Edgar Allan Poe said that apart from poetry, the form most advantageous for the exertion of "highest genius" was the "short prose narrative," whose length he defined as taking "from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal." Novels, Poe argued, were objectionable because they required a reader to take breaks. "Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal," he wrote, "modify, annul or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book." Because you have to stop reading novels every now and then - to shower, to eat, to check your Twiner feed - their power weakens. Short stories and novellas on the other hand offer writers a chance to affect readers more deeply because a reader can be held in thrall for the entirety of the experience. They offer writers, in Poe's phrasing, "the immense force derivable from totality." WHETHER you agree with Poe or not, that totality is ultimately what makes "Train Dreams" so good. Johnson's 1997 novel "Already Dead" is 435 pages; his 2007 novel "Tree of Smoke" is 624 pages. They are big, pitted, expansive books over which one treks, evening after evening, sometimes hungry, sometimes sunburned - you are in them so long that worldly interests intervene on your right and left. The kids need to be fed; the dog needs to be walked; 50 other stories intrude on your life. "Train Dreams," though, presents an opportunity for a more unified experience. One airplane flight, or one shady afternoon in a chair somewhere, and you'll have passed through the entire thing. Maybe "Already Dead" and "Tree of Smoke" are big navigable Mississippi Rivers of narrative, and there are lots of times when a reader wants to float the Mississippi. But sometimes one wants only to walk for an hour or two, if only to look for that one intersection of place and hour where the trees whisper and the light streams and the water glows. I've reread "Train Dreams" several times over the last years, and it hasn't lost any power. Yet hardly anyone I know has read it. Writers who love and teach Denis Johnson's work don't always know it. Students who have composed whole graduate theses full of drug-muzzy paeans to Johnson's story collection "Jesus' Son" rarely have heard of it. So it is with a heaping cup of pleasure, and a tablespoon of reluctance, that I tell you this little novella is finally its own book, with its own cover, as easy to find as a national park. Someone has finally put up a sign: Here Is Something Worth Seeing. I console myself: Most good and private things eventually get shared. Cormac McCarthy visits with Oprah; Bob Dylan gives some of his best tracks to Starbucks. "Train Dreams" ought to be read. You can now go ahead and read it. The seams of history might unravel at any moment and the legends of the woods come slipping through. Anthony Doerr's latest book, the story collection "Memory Wall," is now available in paperback.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

National Book Award-winner Johnson, ever the literary shape-shifter, looks back to America's expansionist fever dream in a haunting frontier ballad about a loner named Robert Grainier. Left in the dark about why he was put on a train by himself as a young boy and sent cross-country to relatives in Idaho, Grainier revels in the hard, dangerous work and steadying loneliness of logging mighty forests and building gravity-defying and spirit-testing railroad bridges over plunging gorges. He finally marries, only to return to the massive undertakings he hungers for, leaving his wife and baby girl in their isolated cabin. After hearing about and witnessing myriad crimes and catastrophes embodying the sublime and the macabre, Grainier is blasted into his own private hell of horror and grief. By the time he emerges, cars and planes have further transformed the world. Johnson draws on history and tall tales to adroitly infuse one contemplative man's solitary life with the boundless mysteries of nature and the havoc of humankind's breakneck technological insurgency, creating a concentrated, reverberating tale of ravishing solemnity and molten lyricism.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Readers eager for a fat follow-up to Tree of Smoke could be forgiven a modicum of skepticism at this tidy volume-a reissue of a 2003 O. Henry Prize-winning novella that originally appeared in the Paris Review-but it would be a shame to pass up a chance to encounter the synthesis of Johnson's epic sensibilities rendered in miniature in the clipped tone of Jesus' Son. The story is a snapshot of early 20th-century America as railroad laborer Robert Granier toils along the rails that will connect the states and transform his itinerant way of life. Drinking in tent towns and spending summers in the wilds of Idaho, Granier misses the fire back home that leaves no trace of his wife and child. The years bring diminishing opportunities, strange encounters, and stranger dreams, but it's not until after participating in the miracle of flight-and a life-changing encounter with a mythical monster-that Granier realizes what he's been looking for. An ode to the vanished West that captures the splendor of the Rockies as much as the small human mysteries that pass through them, this svelte stand-alone has the virtue of being a gem in itself, and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to Johnson. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

National Book Award winner Johnson (Tree of Smoke) has skillfully packed an epic tale into novella length in this account of the life of Idaho Panhandle railroad laborer Robert Grainer. Born in 1886, orphaned by age six and placed with cousins, he's not outwardly remarkable or compelling as the episodes of his life unfold. He marries Gladys and fathers Kate while working for a timber company, and he witnesses disparate events and characters from influenza epidemics and the advent of automobiles and airplanes to an unscheduled area stop by a young Elvis Presley. Few if any of these leave much of an impression on Robert or on a reader; instead, the appeal here lies in setting and mood. The gothic sensibility of the wilderness and isolated settings and Native American folktales, peppered liberally with natural and human-made violence, add darkness to a work that lingers viscerally with readers. VERDICT Fans of the literary end of historical fiction (with a dash of magical realism), American West/Pacific Northwest settings, or authors like Bret Harte or Cormac McCarthy should appreciate this one. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/7/11.]-Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast, TX (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Train Dreams 1 I n the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle. Three of the railroad gang put the thief under restraint and dragged him up the long bank toward the bridge under construction fifty feet above the Moyea River. A rapid singsong streamed from the Chinaman voluminously. He shipped and twisted like a weasel in a sack, lashing backward with his one free fist at the man lugging him by the neck. As this group passed him, Grainier, seeing them in some distress, lent assistanceand found himself holding one of the culprit's bare feet. The man facing him, Mr. Sears, of Spokane International's management, held the prisoner almost uselessly by the armpit and was the only one of them, besides the incomprehensible Chinaman, to talk during the hardest part of their labors: "Boys, I'm damned if we ever see the top of this heap!" Then we're hauling him all the way? was the question Grainier wished to ask, but he thought it better to save his breath for the struggle. Sears laughed once, his face pale with fatigue and horror. They all went down in the dust and got righted, went down again, the Chinaman speaking in tongues and terrifying the four of them to the point that whatever they may have had in mind at the outset, he was a deader now. Nothing would do but to toss him off the trestle. They came abreast of the others, a gang of a dozen men pausing in the sun to lean on their tools and wipe at sweat and watch this thing. Grainier held on convulsively to the Chinaman's horny foot, wondering at himself, and the man with the other foot let loose and sat down gasping in the dirt and got himself kicked in the eye before Grainier took charge of the free-flailing limb. "It was just for fun. For fun," the man sitting in the dirtsaid, and to his confederate there he said, "Come on, Jel Toomis, let's give it up." "I can't let loose," this Mr. Toomis said, "I'm the one's got him by the neck!" and laughed with a gust of confusion passing across his features. "Well, I've got him!" Grainier said, catching both the little demon's feet tighter in his embrace. "I've got the bastard, and I'm your man!" The party of executioners got to the midst of the last completed span, sixty feet above the rapids, and made every effort to toss the Chinaman over. But he bested them by clinging to their arms and legs, weeping his gibberish, until suddenly he let go and grabbed the beam beneath him with one hand. He kicked free of his captors easily, as they were trying to shed themselves of him anyway, and went over the side, dangling over the gorge and making hand-over-hand out over the river on the skeleton form of the next span. Mr. Toomis's companion rushed over now, balancing on a beam, kicking at the fellow's fingers. The Chinaman dropped from beam to beam like a circus artist downward along the crosshatch structure. A couple of the work gang cheered his escape, while others, though not quite certain why he was being chased, shouted that the villain ought to be stopped. Mr. Sears removed from the holsteron his belt a large old four-shot black-powder revolver and took his four, to no effect. By then the Chinaman had vanished.     Hiking to his home after this incident, Grainier detoured two miles to the store at the railroad village of Meadow Creek to get a bottle of Hood's Sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, and their infant daughter, Kate. It was hot going up the hill through the woods toward the cabin, and before getting the last mile he stopped and bathed in the river, the Moyea, at a deep place upstream from the village. It was Saturday night, and in preparation for the evening a number of the railroad gang from Meadow Creek were gathered at the hole, bathing with their clothes on and sitting themselves out on the rocks to dry before the last of the daylight left the canyon. The men left their shoes and boots aside and waded in slowly up to their shoulders, whooping and splashing. Many of the men already sipped whiskey from flasks as they sat shivering after their ablutions. Here and there an arm and hand clutching a shabby hat jutted from the surface while somebody got his head wet. Grainier recognizednobody and stayed off by himself and kept a close eye on his boots and his bottle of sarsaparilla. Walking home in the falling dark, Grainier almost met the Chinaman everywhere. Chinaman in the road. Chinaman in the woods. Chinaman walking softly, dangling his hands on arms like ropes. Chinaman dancing up out of the creek like a spider.     He gave the Hood's to Gladys. She sat up in bed by the stove, nursing the baby at her breast, down with a case of the salt rheum. She could easily have braved it and done her washing and cut up potatoes and trout for supper, but it was their custom to let her lie up with a bottle or two of the sweet-tasting Hood's tonic when her head ached and her nose stopped, and get a holiday from such chores. Grainier's baby daughter, too, looked rheumy. Her eyes were a bit crusted and the discharge bubbled pendulously at her nostrils while she suckled and snorted at her mother's breast. Kate was four months old, still entirely bald. She did not seem to recognize him. Her little illness wouldn't hurt her as long as she didn't develop a cough out of it. Now Grainier stood by the table in the single-roomcabin and worried. The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully while they dragged him along, and any bad thing might come of it. Though astonished now at the frenzy of the afternoon, baffled by the violence, at how it had carried him away like a seed in a wind, young Grainier still wished they'd gone ahead and killed that Chinaman before he'd cursed them. He sat on the edge of the bed. "Thank you, Bob," his wife said. "Do you like your sarsaparilla?" "I do. Yes, Bob." "Do you suppose little Kate can taste it out your teat?" "Of course she can."     Many nights they heard the northbound Spokane International train as it passed through Meadow Creek, two miles down the valley. Tonight the distant whistle woke him, and he found himself alone in the straw bed. Gladys was up with Kate, sitting on the bench by the stove, scraping cold boiled oats off the sides of the pot and letting the baby suckle this porridge from the end of her finger. "How much does she know, do you suppose, Gladys? As much as a dog-pup, do you suppose?" "A dog-pup can live by its own after the bitch weans it away," Gladys said. He waited for her to explain what this meant. She often thought ahead of him. "A man-child couldn't do that way," she said, "just go off and live after it was weaned. A dog knows more than a babe until the babe knows its words. But not just a few words. A dog raised around the house knows some words, too--as many as a baby." "How many words, Gladys?" "You know," she said, "the words for its tricks and the things you tell it to do." "Just say some of the words, Glad." It was dark and he wanted to keep hearing her voice. "Well, fetch, and come, and sit, and lay, and roll over. Whatever it knows to do, it knows the words." In the dark he felt his daughter's eyes turned on him like a cornered brute's. It was only his thoughts tricking him, but it poured something cold down his spine. He shuddered and pulled the quilt up to his neck. All of his life Robert Grainier was able to recall this very moment on this very night. Copyright (c) 2002 by Denis Johnson Excerpted from Train Dreams by Denis Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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