I previously read his "Tree of Smoke" novel and picked this one up based on a best-of list from last year. It's a quick read and very pleasant novella with which to pass the time. On the one hand, it delves into the prosaic details of living and working in the Northwest in the 30s and 40s, giving a glimpse into the work done to fell timber and clear the way for train passage. Sadly, it is this very work of clearing and building such mammoth infrastructure projects that will eventually lead to an economy in which many jobs produce little of consequence and little of value or meaning. (Like the majority of jobs now?) On the other hand, the novella touches on the mysteries that haunt the protagonist as he tries to make sense of the world—the loss of his wife and daughter in a forest fire, the imaginings of them returning to him in phantasmic form or in the form of a she-wolf, and of the world itself being transformed from an animistic world into a mechanized one.

Perhaps most mysterious and confounding of all is that the last page was reminiscent of a scene in the movie "Wet Hot American Summer." If the final page doesn't remind you of the final performance in the talent show in "Wet Hot American Summer," then I must be crazy. (Denis Johnson even uses the phrase "higher and higher" on the final page, as if to pay homage to the music of "Wet Hot American Summer" in that particular sequence of the movie.)