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Train Dreams

Denis Johnson

3.83 · Rating details · 15,902 ratings · 1,879 reviews

Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we ...more

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Paperback, 116 pages

Published May 22nd 2012 by Picador USA (first published 2002)

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May 07, 2016 Bill Kerwin rated it it was amazing

I refuse to stain this small perfect book with a long review.

This short novel is a dream: the kind you dip into, just for a drowsy second, yet wake from to find youself still immersed in a great epic--wounded by its sorrow, giddy with its marvels—all visited upon you in the blink of an eye.

The story of Robert Grainier, a laborer in the Great Northwest during the first third of the last century, is full of tragedy, tall tales, temporal dislocations, homespun humor, plain-speaking, and ...more

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Dec 31, 2012 s.penkevich rated it liked it

Shelves: nature, americana, wild_wild_west

‘God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit.’

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, a novella shortlisted as a ‘Best Book of 2011’ by almost everyone from the New York Times to Esquire, and also considered for the Pulitzer, is a haunting little book that blossoms from the vine of American history. Spanning from the turn of the 20th century up until the late 60s, Johnson positions the reader to watch as the American west is transfigured by the technological growth of the ...more

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Oct 28, 2016 Fabian rated it it was amazing

Joins pantheon of stellar (first!) novellas from literary cosmonauts such as "The Neon Bible" & "A Pale View of Hills". This is better than the drug chronicle and much-imitated "Jesus's Son"--without that confusion, the story is more than captivating and, this being Johnson, devastating: American dreams, y'all!

It's all here in the perfect, brutal little package.

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Aug 07, 2015 Fionnuala added it

Shelves: metamorphosis, review-may-contain-comic-content

I hardly know anymore where reading ends and real life begins - the border between the two is getting hazier and hazier.

Take Thursday evening, for example. I was on a train finishing a book called A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. A powerful book, such a powerful book that when I’d finished, I needed a distraction so I took out my iPad to see if I had a book on the ereader app to help me pass the rest of the journey pleasantly. Train Dreams seemed perfect at a little over a hundred pages, and so it ...more

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Jul 10, 2016 Matthias rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: my-reviews

"He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered."

I sometimes wonder if I'm a natural reader. There are moments, like the greater part of last year, where there's nothing I like more, and whichever book that comes my way will be devoured in short notice. Other times, like the last couple of months, I become more picky, books don't manage to grab a hold of me due to other distractions "He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered."

I sometimes wonder if I'm a natural reader. There are moments, like the greater part of last year, where there's nothing I like more, and whichever book that comes my way will be devoured in short notice. Other times, like the last couple of months, I become more picky, books don't manage to grab a hold of me due to other distractions that monopolize my mind, and only the right book at the right time can snap me back to the place I know is wonderful. The place that is books and the stories they tell. But life sometimes has a way of shutting the doors to that magical garden. With Train Dreams I've found a book that opened those doors again. The right book at the right time.

I'm still rusty on the reviews, my fingers literaly feel wooden as I type this up, so this will be a short one. Given it's a short book counting a mere 116 pages one might think this is adequate, but don't let the number of pages fool you: this is a gem, of which it's impossible to say everything given the many ways light can shine on it.

Basically, it tells the story of Robert Grainer, so it is actually a fictional biography of sorts. We are told of the most important moments in his life, how he met his foster family, his wife, what kind of jobs he worked on, a depiction of his daily routine and his life-defining moments. Robert Grainer is not a special man, with no talents or traits that make him stand out in any way.

Aside from the spot-on depiction of the hard life of an early 1900's man working in and living off the forest, making an enemy out of the trees, the book also contains a mysterious aspect of dreams, visions, strange behavior and mystical creatures. Cataclysmic events are told in the same tone as a trip to the fair, making this book the perfect blend of raw, realistic impressions of physical hardships mixed with the more ethereal mental consequences of coating emotions with the ashes of losses lived through. When reading this particular brew it's easy to get in the flow of a dream, of a train ride, allowing the words to take you wherever, whenever. And once in a while that flow is obstructed with a nugget of a pure emotion, a sense of loneliness or sadness whose description stands out like a mountain in the rest of this book, the kind of nugget that makes you wake up from that dream because it's become too real. You give it some thought, lie your head down and before you know it you're back on the train. This book has been a subtle, well-balanced experience of profound thought and the lightness of everyday life.

Don't let the title of Train Dreams fool you, for it's the real thing. I heartily recommend it! ...more

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Aug 26, 2013 Andrew Smith rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I like novellas, they feel a lesser undertaking than settling into a novel in its full form. For me it also opens up options I might spurn if I thought I'd have to take on three hundred or more pages.

I first picked up this thin book at at a local bookstore - I was attracted by a single sentence as I briefly flicked through it. I didn't read the blurb or otherwise pre-acquaint myself with the text and I didn't buy it at the time, but the sentence stayed with me and I later bought the Kindle ...more

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May 06, 2018 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2018, modern-lit

This little book has been sitting on my to-read shelf for so long that I can't remember whose recommendation prompted me to buy it. I am very glad that I finally found the small amount of time needed to read it, as it is a beautiful and atmospheric miniature.

The book's subject is Grainier, and it follows his isolated life in a remote and wild valley in the north of Idaho through a series of episodes that span his long lifetime. It is partly an elegy for the old west and partly a reflection on ...more

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Sep 30, 2018 Steven Godin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: america, fiction

Train Dreams appears at first if it is on familiar territory: a short but sweeping third-person historical novel which grapples strongly with the American myth of the pioneer sensibility, the dramatic speed with which that remarkable nation arose around a startled populace. Robert Grainier it's main character is an itinerant labourer, building bridges and felling trees for the rapidly expanding railways of America in the early 20th century.

He finds happiness with his wife and infant daughter, Train Dreams appears at first if it is on familiar territory: a short but sweeping third-person historical novel which grapples strongly with the American myth of the pioneer sensibility, the dramatic speed with which that remarkable nation arose around a startled populace. Robert Grainier it's main character is an itinerant labourer, building bridges and felling trees for the rapidly expanding railways of America in the early 20th century.

He finds happiness with his wife and infant daughter, but is living is a poor, crushingly modest and life, described with gorgeous economy. Sleeping under old civil war canvas, his young eyes fall upon land and forest that white men and women have barely ventured into, yet those same eyes will glimpse Elvis on his touring train in the late 1950's and the bewildering superhighways of the 60's. Grainier is an innocent, seemingly untroubled by greater complication or the scourge of doubt, who is ultimately crushed by a more desperately cruel and irrational world than he could have dreamed of. And dream he does, thus, fulfilling the novel's title. Characteristically, Johnson releases a lurking grotesquery which gives the novel a rugged bite. As always, main and peripheral characters are magically conjured from a few deeply considered, gruff sentences. Grainier is an everyman yet also no man; essentially an orphan, with conflicting versions of his origins. The landmarks of his tough existence include the attempted execution of a storeroom thief, who seems to put a curse on him; a man shot by his own dog and the childhood discovery of a fatally injured railway hobo.

As a book which looks at the history of one person’s lifelong struggle to come to turns with the loss of his loved ones, and an ever changing America this book works, however, the story isn't filled with greater purpose and deeper meaning, and is ultimately superficial and way too short. The journey of Robert Gainer is compelling and incredibly moving, and the way Johnson has written with such affection and attention to detail makes this a decent short read. I just would have preferred it to be an expansive epic fives times bigger, digging deeper into the vast unknown of it's huge scope. ...more

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Aug 27, 2013 Paquita Maria Sanchez added it · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, usa

Owing to the fact that I have read the semi-autobiographical short story collection Jesus' Son a few times (and you should absolutely do that), I had a wrong-headed assumption about the subject matter of this novella. Based partly on the title, I figured this would be a more modern take on the same territory in JS, of the grim realities and screwed up interpersonal dynamics of off the grid types, namely junkies and alcoholics who haven't done their taxes in a decade and smell like cigarettes, Owing to the fact that I have read the semi-autobiographical short story collection Jesus' Son a few times (and you should absolutely do that), I had a wrong-headed assumption about the subject matter of this novella. Based partly on the title, I figured this would be a more modern take on the same territory in JS, of the grim realities and screwed up interpersonal dynamics of off the grid types, namely junkies and alcoholics who haven't done their taxes in a decade and smell like cigarettes, patchouli, and musky rot. I guess I thought that instead of sticking to the 1970's era fuckhead sort, it would focus more directly on your garden variety heroin-addicted, train-hopping oogle type, the sort of folks who look at you like you're single-handedly setting feminism back 50 years when you say it's insane for a young girl to thumb rides, but don't mind enough to not drink all your beer and eat your spoiled leftovers. I was intrigued by this non-existent premise because spotting characters from my reality makes me feel dimly special, like I'm back in the green room with the author having an incredibly stimulating conversation about silly people and their silly phases in this big, silly world. I'm glad I was wrong, because it lead to me reading this tiny, wistful piece about grief, loneliness, lust, American modernization, superstition, and the small wonders and giant horrors that abound over the span of a lifetime.

It's fitting that this book is so tiny, as it covers all the major events of a simple man's birth to death cycle, and those moments are few and far between, ranging from tragic to crazy to fairly unremarkable to anyone but him. Given the size, I really shouldn't reveal too much about the man's history, but the novella has a feel and tone to it which reminded me a bit of The Straight Story. Just as I found in Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson - or "Penis Johnson" as one of my roommates calls him due to being irked by the name-spelling - has a way of making his sentences wash over you like mist, an elegantly effortless drizzle of big feelings in very few words. It just flows. You care about this man, you hurt from his loss, the wolf girl spooks you too, you feel his horrible epiphany of thoughtless, self-imposed isolation and sexual frustration, and you just want to kiss his booboos and lie-tell him it'll all be fine some day. There's a whole lotta love in this little package.

I feel pretty safe recommending you check this out, since you can and will knock it out in one sitting. The physical act of reading this feels like waking abruptly and jotting out a particularly bizarre, poignant dream, then going over it searching for guidance and self-understanding within your brain's droppings. Oh, and I also recommend that Penis Johnson writes a book about train-hoppin' squatter kids, because I still want to read about that through his lovely, incisive voice. ...more

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Jul 05, 2015 Paul rated it really liked it

Shelves: american-novels

This is a brief novella, easily readable in one sitting; well written and lyrical. It is a third person historical tale about the life of Robert Grainier spanning the period from the 1880s to the 1960s with the depression of the 1930s standing out in the background. Grainier is a manual worker who works over the years on the railroads, logging, transporting; but generally earning from the sweat of his brow. Grainier is an ordinary man with hopes and dreams, a decent man who suffers loss and ...more

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May 28, 2012 Mike Puma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

A solid story, sad and satisfying, one which might, initially, provoke feelings of déjà vu in those who’ve read A Prayer for the Dying.

An American mountain man, stoic and self-sufficient, enjoys an all too brief period of love and intimacy before tragedy and loss impose, and he’s left to fend for and only for himself. Johnson’s gentle prose resists a stereotype, rendering the protagonist credible and admirable. The inevitable wolf-girl scene defies belief but situates the story in a mythic

...more

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Mar 22, 2015 Josh rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015

As me and my better half perused the shelves of our local library, we came upon Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Even though I hadn’t read any of Johnson’s works prior to, I had had the curiosity to check him out via my girlfriends’ mentioning of Jesus’ Son last year. As I flipped to the back page to look at the author’s picture (something I’m strangely accustomed to do), I see a man sitting with his back to the wall; with black-tinted sunglasses looking up to the heavens, sun-drenched, cool and As me and my better half perused the shelves of our local library, we came upon Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Even though I hadn’t read any of Johnson’s works prior to, I had had the curiosity to check him out via my girlfriends’ mentioning of Jesus’ Son last year. As I flipped to the back page to look at the author’s picture (something I’m strangely accustomed to do), I see a man sitting with his back to the wall; with black-tinted sunglasses looking up to the heavens, sun-drenched, cool and collected like a man with no worries; nothing but time on his side and a small resemblance to the treacherous megalomaniac Jim Jones, but only in profile. I read the description of the short novella and was intrigued, my interest piqued not only with book cover, but with the story described within.

We brought it home and it sat amongst the rest of our library pile of books that we obtained that weekend day. Other books were chosen first, denying my first exposure to Johnson’s first-rate story-telling. As the rain hits the panels of my hilltop apartment, I finally felt the need to read this short novella of the natural world and of the unpredictable subconscious.

Johnson’s story of a simple, solitary man born into mystery living the life of a woodsman who encounters love and family for the first time in his life and then the catastrophe that takes it all away is a good read; not profound, but still with purpose and substance.

Robert Grainer is an everyday choke setter along the Spokane International Railroad, mostly working in the panhandle of Idaho. Not knowing who he came from or where he’s going, he meets his eventual wife Gladys and later has a daughter named Kate. They live in a cabin in the middle of the woods and as he goes to work along the railroad, she tends to the home, keeping the child, being the homemaker that he desperately needs. Robert is content with his life, sending money home as he earns it, living off the land as he needs to, without a care in the world, much like my description of the author. As a forest fire engulfs the forest for which he’s made his home with his family and also taken his family without a trace, he has dreams of which are supernatural in nature; somewhat prophetic and magical. As the years go on, Robert rebuilds the ashy soot-laden cabin into what it was and lives a solitary life for the next half century until he perishes himself. As he was brought into the world under mysterious circumstances, he enters that black void under the same; being found several months after his expiration. Robert’s character shows how humans, after a certain amount of time can forget not only our loved ones, but ourselves. Losing who we are, how we are, what we are, in other words, losing ourselves is a horrible thing, some may even say more than death. ...more

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Nov 03, 2014 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it

As a small child he arrived on a train and later would not have a clear understanding of where he came from or what his background was. For a time, as an adult he would make a living from trains, clearing the trees so more tracks could be laid, a necessity as more and more people moved West. It is the early twentieth century and great changes are taking place in the United States. Yet for the most part the West was a raw and hard place for a man to make a life and raise a family.

Told in a spare ...more

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Sep 08, 2019 Barbara rated it really liked it

This is the story of Robert Granier, a quiet man living a quiet life. It is a story of little action, and yet, it says so much.

This novella is so atmospheric and dream-like. Trains are an integral part of Granier's life. Orphaned at six he is sent to the panhandle of Idaho to his new family via the Great Northern Railroad. His first memory is of the mass deportation of a hundred or more Chinese families clamoring aboard three open flatbeds. He worked for many years clearing the forests in ...more

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May 08, 2018 Jon Nakapalau rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, sociology, cultural-studies, travel, history

A beautiful encapsulation of the life of an average man - haunting and expansive - a compassionate version of Babbitt.

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Oct 05, 2015 Darwin8u rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, 2015

“Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he’d have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night’s noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl’s panting complaint.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

description

So, I've just read my second great American novella set in Northern Idaho. 'Train Dreams' isn't A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, ...more

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Feb 21, 2018 Annelies rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction-contemporary-american

This small book has a great palette of feelings to offer you. En entire life opens and expands itself while reading the compact chapters. Mesmerising.

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Mar 29, 2013 Tony rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: u-s-lit

Early in this novella, but not in his chronological life, Robert Grainier feels obliged to help fellow workers grab a Chinese laborer, working in the Pacific Northwest, and throw him off a span of bridge into a gorge below. They are ultimately unsuccessful, but Death is not denied otherwise in the life of Grainier. In fact, everyone he meets seems to have a sorry end.

The story of this man (this Country?) is told in sepia-toned, non-linear vignettes. His Asian adventure (if you want to read ...more

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Aug 24, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning—at least, he didn’t know Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning—at least, he didn’t know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

“The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully…and any bad thing might come of it.”

And that was the signal incident that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier’s dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson’s story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier’s long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

“He was standing on a cliff…into a kind of arena enclosing…Spruce Lake…and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens.”

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

“…when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth…It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart…”

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson’s ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past—of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

My oroginal review posted at MostlyFiction.com Here is the link:
http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2... ...more

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Jun 14, 2018 Petra rated it liked it

I'm not sure what to think of this one. This short novella tells a long tale in a sparse and emotionless way. Some segments were interesting, some were not.
Robert Granier is a loner throughout his life. He doesn't seem to be emotional in any way; he goes with the flow. He comes from nowhere; he doesn't know his parents or birth place. It makes for an unemotional story and gives it an aloof feel.
The train is always in the background. I like trains, so this is comforting, in its way. I'm not sure ...more

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Feb 05, 2012 Lou rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: best-reads, short-stories, historical-fiction

This novella is a work of great magical story telling. A story that will lay for some time in your thoughts, of novella length but holds depth and meaning more than many nine hundred page novels out there now. I can't stress enough on how you must read this. If I ever one day i write a novella I aspire and dream to write with this quality and craftsmanship.

The main protagonist is a man of good virtue he is on the straight and narrow, due to many things he has witnessed and taking account of. One This novella is a work of great magical story telling. A story that will lay for some time in your thoughts, of novella length but holds depth and meaning more than many nine hundred page novels out there now. I can't stress enough on how you must read this. If I ever one day i write a novella I aspire and dream to write with this quality and craftsmanship.

The main protagonist is a man of good virtue he is on the straight and narrow, due to many things he has witnessed and taking account of. One day in his past he met and learned from a man in the wilderness, he was in distress and pain, a vagrant alcoholic who spilled out his crimes in his last breath in. This rather rude awakening in his young age left a mark and he kept away from intoxicants and lust. He became a hard worker on the railroad of a bygone era.

Time passed and he wed a girl of fine character, who he met at a church meeting.
They had a child a girl. He regularly went off to work in various towns, on one days return he found a horrible site the woods and town was overcome by fire and his loved ones no where to be found. He looked for them all over town all the places they had visited previously but no sign. This terror of his missing family eventually had an effect on his psyche and he had many sleepless nights due to having very bad nightmares of his wife and child. The years passed by and he tried to pick up his life again working other towns but eventually he finds himself back again home.

There has become word of a wolf-girl, a kind of half wolf and human creature in the wilderness. Our main character fears the darkness and crossing paths with this myth. It's only a matter of time in that which he find out if it be folly or fact.

This has some really poignant and happy moments. You feel the desperate times and the atmosphere, the fear, the love and the loss. Be prepared to possibly shed a tear in this heart felt work of literal art as the author carries you into the footsteps of one memorable characters life, through his dreams and nightmares.
Denis Johnson is a author that I am liking more and more and comes highly recommended by many authors including Joyce Carol Oates and Alan Heathcock who recommended this to me.
Actually these three authors Denis Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates and Alan Heathcock carry original potent voices, they write stories that penetrate and touch the heart and remain in your psyche, they may stay in your dreams for an eternity!

This novella is a work of magical realism that has a hypnotic potent voice, sprawling and engrossing, violence and beauty.
Its words will remain for a time like ancient carvings in a tree.

I had to read this twice and have highlighted these excerpts below. (There was even more than this!)

"Meanwhile Robert Grainier had passed his thirty fifth birthday. He missed Gladys and Kate, his Li'l Girl and Li'l Li'l Girl, but he'd lived thirty two years a bachelor before finding a wife, and easily slipped back into a steadying loneliness out here among the countless spruce."

"But the captain said he feared an influenza epidemic like the one in 1897. He himself had been orphaned then, his entire family of thirteen siblings dead in a single week."

"But maybe the incident affected him in a way nobody could have traced"

"The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. They spent the whole afternoon among the daisies kissing. He felt glorious and full of more blood than he was supposed to have in him."

"Soon he was passing through a forest of charred, gigantic spears that only a few days past had been evergreens. The world was gray, white, black, and acrid, without a single live animal or plant, no longer burning and yet still full of the warmth and life of the fire."

"All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world."

"The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall … Nothing from the pup."

"But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant."

"The wolves and coyotes howled without letup all night, 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."

"Dark theater full of disembodied voices discussing plain facts about secret sins he would die, he would be dragged down to Hell and tortured in his parts eternally before the foul and stinking President of all Pulchritude. Naked, he stood swaying in his yard."

"The forests that filled his life were so thickly populous and so tall that generally they blocked him from seeing how far away the world was, but right now it seemed clear there were mountains enough for everybody to get his own. The curse had left him, and the contagion of his lust had drifted off and settled into one of those distant valleys."

...more

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Aug 28, 2014 Sentimental Surrealist rated it it was ok

If anyone can be accused of writing fiction way too closely tailored to the tastes of prizegivers, it's Philip Roth.

And Jonathan Franzen.

And John Updike.

Okay, a lot of writers. But let's add Denis Johnson to that list, which is a damn shame because it wasn't always this way. Jesus' Son and Angels are both great fucking books, visceral and ghostly at the same time. But then something happened, and I'm not sure what, but Johnson became this sudden chronicle of the American mythology. Okay, fine, If anyone can be accused of writing fiction way too closely tailored to the tastes of prizegivers, it's Philip Roth.

And Jonathan Franzen.

And John Updike.

Okay, a lot of writers. But let's add Denis Johnson to that list, which is a damn shame because it wasn't always this way. Jesus' Son and Angels are both great fucking books, visceral and ghostly at the same time. But then something happened, and I'm not sure what, but Johnson became this sudden chronicle of the American mythology. Okay, fine, doesn't have to be bad - I love me some Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and Housekeeping-era Marilynne Robinson - but did you ever get the feeling that Writing About America was kind of the easy way out? Like, write a book about the Big American Whatever is all you have to do to win prize upon prize upon prize? Especially after Updike's whole Rabbit Armstrong yippie-dippie-dippie-doo became an admittedly pretty but still dull as dishwater target for any acclaim the Institution could throw at it?

So this is Johnson's attempt at tapping into American mythology, and it's popular and acclaimed and supposed to be wonderfully ghostly, but I am just not feeling the damn thing. Part of it is the sheer dodginess of romanticizing American frontier life to begin with, especially when you compare the Native Americans as either superstitious savages or magical benign forces with a weirdly vested interest in helping their conquerors. This aspect of Train Dreams SUCKS and really can't be justified by any pretty prose... look, McCarthy's Border Trilogy cuts close to romanticizing the last days of the Old West, but at least Blood Meridian proves he's smart enough to realize that there were, y'know, people there before who were kinda, like, brutally slaughtered and forced off their own land so we could satisfy our imperialist desires. Urgh, not even my only problem with this novella, but it sure is problematic that Johnson keeps portraying the not-Americans as these savage louts. Y'know how Tree of Smoke did the same thing every single 'nam movie does and portrayed the Vietnamese as not much better than violent children? Yeah, kinda like that.

But even Tree of Smoke is better than this, and Tree of Smoke was about three, four hundred pages longer than it needed to be. Did it drag n' drag? Of course, but sometimes the endless cloak-and-dagger shenanigans produced interesting results. There are the rare moments when Johnson does tap into these quasi-mythic rhythms, and sometimes they get subverted into a gallows joke, but you want the rest? Well, here's the rest: cardboard Robert Grainier, the kind of character who has a bunch of stuff happen to him but doesn't really seem to react or do much at all about or with it, has cardboard conversations with other people and endures the sort of tragedies that happen to characters in Big Serious Novels. Same problem as Tree of Smoke, really, and I for one miss the days when characters schlepped from Chicago to Phoenix and got mixed up in bank robberies and landed in prisons occupied by people who thought they were Jesus. I 100% disagree with the common claim that people who can't write "normal" fiction instead write "weird" fiction, since Johnson portrayed his bizarro world roughly 10,000,000 times more interestingly than the mythic or whatever worlds of his more recent stuff.

So maybe I should treat Johnson as two different authors and ignore everything he wrote after a certain point? Hard to tell, but this one is a technically decent novel that just doesn't grab me. The prose only occasionally works any emotions up, the characters aren't, and the whole thing smacks as a Gone with the Wind-style lament for colonial days. Blurgh. Time to reread Angels, I suppose. ...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Steve rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: westerns, fiction

I was looking for a little piece of Americana in this novella, and Denis Johnson certainly delivered. It tells the story of Robert Granier, who's an everyday kind of guy, working in logging and bridge building in the early 20th Century. It's a sad story, since Granier lives, for the most part, a lonely (and long) life against the stunning backdrop of the Idaho Panhandle. Granier does experience love, but it's a love that is tragically cut short due to a raging fire that transforms the landscape ...more

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Mar 19, 2015 Zoeytron rated it it was ok

Shelves: public-library

I could not sync up with this story, expected something much bleaker. There didn't seem to be room for the inclusion of the mysterious secrets of Moya Valley and the main character's bent toward howling with the wolves at night. There was certainly nothing wrong with the writing, the tale simply did not click with me.

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Jan 06, 2014 Melanie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Novellas can often be underwhelming, there is so little time to be hooked by the narrative, to fall for the characters.

For a good half of this reading I was thinking small, small, small. Tiny splinters aggravating the surface of the imagination.

I think Grainer's wolf howling was the fulcrum and suddenly I was right there amid the charred wilderness, four walls and no roof.

Later as the years unfold and Grainer's bones fist and knot, none of it feels like dying. Some of what goes on stills ...more

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Apr 25, 2016 Jonathan Ashleigh rated it liked it

Shelves: recent

This short and sweet novella tells the story of one mans life in the Pacific North West; he never gets close enough to see the ocean however. I was waiting for it all to be pulled together in the end and this didn’t quite happen, but I gave it three stars anyway because of the way the narrator told the story. The narrator makes this worth reading because the events are beautifully described in the language of the time.

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Jul 23, 2019 Josh rated it it was amazing

Finally a western that doesn’t want to cut your throat, but to have you howl at the moon.

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Sep 19, 2011 Edward rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Can a man live through most of a century and not really be a part of it? The historical events that mark a century for history are wars, rise and fall of nations, political leaders, inventions, cultural shifts beginning with artists – they have virtually no impact on Robert Grainie in this novella. He lives an isolated existence that spans two thirds of the 20th century in the woods of the north Idaho Panhandle. His only connection with a larger world are the trains that rumble through the Can a man live through most of a century and not really be a part of it? The historical events that mark a century for history are wars, rise and fall of nations, political leaders, inventions, cultural shifts beginning with artists – they have virtually no impact on Robert Grainie in this novella. He lives an isolated existence that spans two thirds of the 20th century in the woods of the north Idaho Panhandle. His only connection with a larger world are the trains that rumble through the village near his cabin on their way west to Seattle or east to Minneapolis.

“The train, moving through it, making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world,” raises the question of just how “dead” this world is. It’s full of life, but not the conventional kind that attracts public attention . The novella opens on a scene of violence, Robert trying to help a vigilante group throw a Chinese worker off a railway trestle. It was the beginning of the century, one marked by prejudice and violence and almost unconsciously Robert participates in it. Later he comes to regret his actions, thinking that perhaps they placed a curse on him.

He’s a decent hard-working honest man who doesn’t drink, fight, fornicate or swear. He almost accidentally meets a woman at church, courts her, and they settle down on his one acre of land. He works in the woods felling trees, a dangerous job, while his wife and daughter are at home. But these two people for whom he lives abruptly perish in a terrible forest fire.

At first Robert has fearful dreams of Gladys and Kate, his wife and daughter, He is haunted by a vision of his wife who comes to visit him in spirit form. He has nightmares of his daughter whom he envisions having escaped the fire and turned into a wolf child. She comes to the cabin one night, wounded, and he sets her broken leg, and then she leaps out the window and disappears.

And then he dreams of trains, one in particular on which he rides and makes him think of his lost childhood. Robert never remarries and is drawn back to the spot where he had built his cabin. The forest comes back, and gradually Robert recovers from the trauma of this loss and forgets that he is a sad man.

He grows old and arthritic, capable of doing only only small jobs around town. He is liked, but when he dies in l968 in his 80’s, he lies dead in his cabin, unnoticed for months, until two hikers find him.

The story doesn’t end there, though. In a kind of epilogue, the scene shifts back to l935 when Grainier was in town and was given tickets to a traveling show starring” Theodore the Wonder Horse”. It also included a “wolf boy” who lurches around the stage in such a way that spectators thought perhaps he was meant to be laughed at. But no one laughs when he stands up straight, opens his throat and a sound emerges “like wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground and gathered into a roar that coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the very minds of those hearing it. . . . It was the originating ideal of such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonely whistle, or opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever” [last words of book].

What’s gone forever are forgotten individuals like Robert Grainier who lived ordinary lives of pleasures and losses, like everyone, dreaming of unknowable selves and destinies. They are people who live close to nature, in this story a force of fate, that is always permeating their lives What can only give meaning to their lives are powerful words like Johnson’s that reach and stretch toward the silence that lies beyond words, the silence that bursts into the origins of evocative music – lonely, moaning, operatic soaring.
...more

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Aug 17, 2012 Rose rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This is one of those books that make me feel like a Failed Grown-Up, because it's been reviewed as an excellent literary read, and accomplished literary people confirm that it's an excellent literary read, and then I read it and I don't like it. I picked it up because it was one of the stories that the podcast Literary Disco was reviewing; when they turned out to love it, and I disliked it utterly, I began to wonder where I went wrong, or what I was missing (and, later, to wonder if maybe this This is one of those books that make me feel like a Failed Grown-Up, because it's been reviewed as an excellent literary read, and accomplished literary people confirm that it's an excellent literary read, and then I read it and I don't like it. I picked it up because it was one of the stories that the podcast Literary Disco was reviewing; when they turned out to love it, and I disliked it utterly, I began to wonder where I went wrong, or what I was missing (and, later, to wonder if maybe this wasn't the podcast for me after all).

It's a story about a guy who is, primarily, a logger in the American West during the first half of the twentieth century. The book is told in only semi-linear fashion, with a lot of jumping back-and-forth in time -- which made it hard to follow for me, not in terms of action (the action was always clear to me), but in terms of *point*. (More on that in a minute.) The story more or less starts with Robert Grainer (our logger guy) going through an immense personal tragedy ... although, like many Superb Literary Stories, I never felt any sort of connection to his loss. His grief was described sideways: there's admittedly-artistic lines about his experience -- the passage about how he initially dreams of the people he lost, and then the dreams fade away -- but I had no real emotional connection to what had happened to him. The language is so poetic and symbolic and otherworldly that it leaves me, as a reader, viewing a character's emotion through a filter. And I should mention that I often *like* poetic language as description -- much of Laurie Halse Anderson's book "Wintergirls" is written in free-verse style, with lots of floating imagery, and I love that. But whereas Anderson's images and poetry serve to heighten the emotion, Johnson's -- for me -- serve to dampen it.

I gave the book two stars instead of one because I did enjoy the writing style -- it kept me reading, anyway -- but I kept reading it and reading it and waiting for the story to get to the point, and it never seemed to do so. Even the odd wolf-themed ending sequence seemed for nothing. There's great descriptive passages about the landscape and the changing times and the rough wilderness and wolves ... but since I never connected to Grainer, or his journey (whatever his journey was), it left me cold.

Possibly this story might work for you actual Real Grown-Ups out there, but for me, the connection was missing. Sorry, Johnson. ...more

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Jul 30, 2017 Lance rated it really liked it

I checked this out because I enjoyed the movie, Jesus' Son, based upon Johnson's book. Really liked the writing. Good stuff. My first experience with Denis Johnson. I'll definitely check out some of his other books.

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topics	posts	views	last activity
Goodreads Librari...: incorrect listing.	2	202	May 10, 2018 11:19PM
Denis Johnson	1	10	Jun 14, 2017 12:43PM
Deep, real reads: Train Dreams	1	6	Jul 28, 2013 12:20AM
21st Century Lite...: Train Dreams - Chapter 3 (June 2013)	10	34	Jul 10, 2013 11:26PM
21st Century Lite...: Train Dreams - General Comments, Spoilers Allowed (June 2013)	72	81	Jul 04, 2013 03:56AM
21st Century Lite...: Train Dreams - Chapter 9 (June 2013)	5	28	Jun 26, 2013 04:52AM

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About Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson

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Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, ...more