Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

And three years later still, he lived in his second cabin, precisely where the old one had stood. Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he'd been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

Robert Grainier is, for all purposes, born on a train: he arrives at his aunt's home in Idaho on a train as a child from some place he cannot remember. He is a man of the New West, without a birthplace or history, and he aids the railroad in opening up the West by cutting down trees and laying track. When he's not working on the railroad he takes a job as a delivery driver, crossing over the backwoods tracks of Idaho's panhandle and western Montana. But he also has in him that spirit of the Old West, which is not marked by the march toward civilization and industry but a place where one goes to be alone: for much of the year he subsists alone in a cabin he built himself in a deep wooded valley, a cabin situated in the very spot where his wife and newborn died in a wildfire.

To me, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is about the contradictions of the American west and its opening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Grainier, when the whole of his life is laid out, lives through a grand transition, beginning life on a train in the wilderness and, later, seeing Elvis Presley performing on a train. Train Dreams is funnily meandering for a novella, passing from incident to incident, simultaneously grotesque and humorous, like the time he serves as an ambulance for a man who was shot by his dog. (How did it happen? Well, he tried to shoot the dog instead, but the dog got the better of him.) Or the story of Grainier's friend Kootenai Bob, who's given alcohol for the first time in his life and ends up so obliterated by a (heavily symbolic) train it takes his people weeks to find and ritually bury all the pieces.

But the through-line that keeps the novella grounded is the untimely death of Grainier's wife and child, who try fruitlessly to escape the wildfire in Grainier's absence. Their disappearance haunts Grainier, who wants to believe against odds that they might have found safety, but his wife appears to him in a dream, or perhaps as a kind of spirit, and shows him her death, but Grainier stays by the cabin out of a belief that the newborn Kate might somehow have survived. And he's right, in a way: Kate has been transformed into a half-woman half-wolf who visits Grainier's cabin one day with her pack, and though Grainier wishes profoundly that he could recover her, or perhaps domesticate her like his dog, her life can only intersect his at this single and infrequent point. Kate is a symbol, perhaps, of a return to wildness, the dream that people brought with them on the railroads and which was obliterated by the railroads.

Is it crazy to say that I didn't think Train Dreams reaches the heights of Johnson's best books, like Jesus's Son, Angels, and Tree of Smoke? Mostly because those books are so great, and their achievements are hard to equal, especially in a small and minor-seeming novella like this one. There's something intentionally and ironically understated about Train Dreams, I think, that subverts our expectations about the great epics of the West. It's a small book about a small life, but a life haunted, as many of us small people are, by the greatness of the country at our back door.