Train Dreams

Train Dreams
by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. 116 pgs. Fiction.

Robert Grainier was born in the West in the late 1800s to unknown parents and wound up at age six or seven with his aunt and uncle in the Idaho panhandle. A bachelor until his mid-thirties, he worked on a logging crew for the railroad, then met and married his wife Gladys whom he lost, along with an infant daughter, to a wildfire. Johnson sets Robert's story in the dreamscape of the long-gone West, and Robert's life seems something of a dream as though it were happening to him rather than undertaken with free will and intent. But Robert is hardly a cipher of a man. What he does wish for, what he sees, what he loves are discernible in him, in a life without expectation, but not without grace. Johnson, winner of the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, a novel about ten times larger than this slim volume, is a writer's writer whose seemingly effortless prose takes one's breath away. Why Johnson chose a flyleaf picture of himself that makes him look like a convict in a cell block in a rocking chair is something of a mystery, but genius has its privileges, apparently.

LW