Denis Johnson’s sturdy yet beguiling Train Dreams, from a slender book of little more than one hundred pages, tells the story of one man and his life in the Idaho panhandle during the first half of the twentieth century. Late in the novella its central character Robert Grainier is somewhat taken aback to be described as a hermit, chafing at the suggestion though the label seems to fit him pretty well, even as his own story and Johnson’s telling of it take in a swell and breadth of the American experience, from the railroad logging era and the birth of the Model T Ford to television sets and the rise of a bucksome yet shy youth by the name of Elvis Presley.
The prose which might at first seem sober and functional turns out to contain poetry in every line. This owes to the peculiar nature of Johnson’s style, which blends a certain frankness – the author always evincing a firm hand over the material details of his fiction and his story’s direction of travel – with a careful blurring of the borders when it comes to his novella’s form and themes. Blunt realism bleeds into the mythic or fantastical while Train Dreams uses a kind of free indirect speech, as Grainier’s voice though seldom heard seems to impinge upon or inhabit the text.
Frequently as a matter of course Johnson hops or drifts back and forth in the chronology while on a couple of occasions the third-person narrator gently chides Grainier when his recapitulation of dates and details goes awry, but while the narrator is therefore privy to the arc of Grainier’s story and all of its specifics it is still the man himself who seems to shape figuratively and emotionally our point of view. In this way Johnson the author proves both scrupulous and theatrical, which is also an accurate depiction of Grainier’s life among ‘his people’ in the mountainous northwest.
By the end of Train Dreams this free indirect speech – earthy yet pliable, incredulous yet knowing and given to sudden shifts in perspective and time – will seem if not the only way to write then at least one imbued with a certain clarity and a deep sense of humanity. Grainier is a witness to the world around him and seldom given to reflecting on his life or fate but the former woodsman still bristles with a keen understanding not only of his haunts in and around the Moyea Valley but of what it means to be a part of our world.
The opening paragraphs of Train Dreams already show Johnson’s penchant for blending the staid and the spectacular, placing them in tension or mucking them together until they become one. We are drawn immediately into a scene of high drama as we learn that in the summer of 1917 one Robert Grainier ‘took part in an attempt of the life of a Chinese laborer’ who stood accused of stealing from the Spokane International Railway’s company stores:
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.
Beyond the roughshod action, a suggestive depiction of place and Johnson’s rare knack for twisting and turning a phrase, his similes always calling to mind precise images with an easy naturalism, we have the sibilance of the Chinaman’s reported ‘singsong’ and the long word ‘voluminously’ which almost seems out of place. Words and sentences might slow us down or even stop us in our tracks, attuning us to the tempo of the world we are witnessing which by virtue of Johnson’s talent always feels profoundly close at hand.
There is unforgettable imagery, like the brightly painted leather pouches in which are collected the remains of Kootenai Bob or more punishingly the red box of chocolates cupped in white papers which Grainier’s wife Gladys and young daughter Kate sucked on, a chocolate apiece once a week. There are plosive descriptions of sounds which the reader will inevitably wish to echo, like when a wearying Grainier’s joints go to pieces following his years of exertions in the woods:
If he reached the wrong way behind him, his right shoulder locked up as dead as a vault door until somebody freed it by putting a foot against his ribs and pulling on his arm. “It takes a great much of pulling,” he’d explain to anyone helping him, closing his eyes and entering a darkness of bone torment, “more than thatāpull harderāa great deal of pulling now, greater, greater, you just have to pull . . .” until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp.
Johnson captures passing glances, shifts of feeling and wafting states of mind, even collective ones like on a train into the town of Bonners Ferry where ‘The passengers in the lurching car had propped open the windows, and any lucky enough to sit beside one kept his face to the sodden breeze’. And there is all of the untrammelled beauty of the valley, even after a devastating fire which continues to exert its acrid hold many years hence:
Though the signs of destruction were fading, it was a very different place now, with different plants and therefore with different animals. The gorgeous spruce had gone. Now came almost exclusively jack pine, which tended to grow up scraggly and mean. He’d been hearing the wolves less and less often, from farther and farther away. The coyotes grew numerous, the rabbits increasingly scarce. From long stretches of the Moyea River through the burn, the trout had gone.
Grainier’s life passes briskly and is beset by tragedy. In a rare moment of self-reflection he sees that he has busied his life as means of masking or holding off pain. And to that end much of Train Dreams deals with this everyday minutiae, covering for instance how he rebuilds a cabin in the Moyea Valley after fire or amounts to something ‘by his own lights’ after purchasing two horses and a wagon and setting himself up in business as a haulier. His life also involves many curious and often ribald encounters, with more diverse entertainments playing a small but highly significant role in rounding out his character and adding meaning to his brief span of time.
Train Dreams centres on the town of Bonners Ferry and the Moyea Valley which stretches up ahead, taking a few summer sojourns in Washington state where Grainier would work as a woodsman on the railroads or bridges, making enough money to make ends meet for the rest of the year. He can recall as his earliest memory the mass expulsion of Chinese families from Fry, a precursor of Bonners Ferry, while he enjoys his small share of the more amiable relationship which seems to prevail, at least for the time being, between the townsfolk and the local Kootenai.
His purview never really gets much wider than this though we come to understand that later in life he does a bit of travelling for the sake of leisure. From his home base in the Idaho panhandle he never quite reaches the Pacific Ocean and stretches east only as far as the town of Libby, some forty miles inside of Montana which in the grand scheme of things is barely a footstep. Yet for much of his life Grainier’s home and surrounds are still conceived as part of the great American frontier.
It is in Montana that he pays ten cents to see the fattest man in the world and just misses Elvis. A spooky story or shadowy road can scare him stiff and he shares in the local superstitions about full moons and wolf people. Grainier will take to howling himself, which flushes out ‘something heavy that tended to collect in his heart’ while Kootenai Bob sagely confirms ‘There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man’. But he is also intrigued and impressed and sometimes left agog by the new developments like massive bridges which can span vast gorges and the miracle of flight.
Denis Johnson who might very well maintain a bird’s eye view of his narrative isn’t interested in providing us with a top-down view of the industrial and technological developments of the early twentieth century however, as we see only through the limited aspect of Grainier, a limpid vessel. This is a narrow character study which gets to the murky heart of our shared humanity, a minor picaresque and a heartfelt love story not a critique of social change. The author is also disinclined to create a fantasy though he does draw upon the fantastical, leaving us like Grainier sometimes awestruck and anyway content enough to wonder.
