Train Dreams: A Novella

"I love a slim book. A lot of my favourite books are what Stanley Donwood would call a ‘slender volume.’ At the moment, I’m reading my way through all of the Maigrets by Simenon, in the order that they were published. They are all between 120 and 150 pages. They’re just beautiful little machines to completely lose yourself in, to export your imagination somewhere completely different. You know: little problems to be solved. It’s wonderful. I love poetry for that—pamphlets and collections often feel like moonshine machines in that way. Every word is so potent. So I like these short, sharp shocks, but Denis Johnson is sort of the exception that proves the rule inasmuch as he is able to put into a slim volume—this novella-length book—what I consider to be the life of quite a long-lived man. That was Denis Johnson’s singular gift, to actually teleport the reader into the personal, lived, rich experience of a person as they live through the 20th-century in the Idaho panhandle; the strangeness and the beauty and the richness of a life lived without much contact with other human beings, and the tragedy of that life, and the unexpected moments of joy and the simplicity of that life. “He manages to make this puddle-sized book fathoms deep” I come back to that word ‘depth.’ He manages to make this puddle-sized book fathoms deep. I adore all his writing. Denis Johnson is someone whose books you would save from your house if it were burning down. Yeah, it’s Cormac McCarthy-esque. But I don’t think he ever quite got the plaudits for it. He was famously up for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in a year where they gave it to nobody. I think that’s such a tragedy for all of the writers who were up for the prize that year. You think: well, there’s a failure here, that’s perhaps not the writers’ failure. To go back my McCarthy comment, I also think that Johnson has a similar kind of focus. Nothing is too big or too small; nothing escapes him. He has a very concentrated, beautifully lyrical view of the world. Some of his language is quite simple, as you say, but then so is Raymond Carver’s. There’s also something quite Carver-like about his writing, there’s something quite Cheever about it. It’s American writing, and it’s quite male , in a way. But it’s honed. It feels like his writing is built rather than written. It feels like a craftsman at work. Often his writing deals with the things that are happening whilst the main event takes place off-page—so the main event is left for a moment, as we look at what the light is doing on the wall, and we look at what the ice crystals are doing from the cattle . . . Their effects are mentioned, their polyphonic and prismatic effects are mentioned. In doing that, he actually heightens the main event. There’s a lot of that. And there’s an amazing bit about two-thirds of the way through the book, which is utterly compelling in its magical realism. It’s a moment of really arresting strangeness in a book, which as you note is fairly stripped back and plain in its writing, although the effects are kaleidoscopic. Suddenly we’re in this magical-realist moment, and you have several pages of just utterly bizarre wonder. But that only whets the sharpness of the rest of the book, the knife-blade clarity of his writing, I think. He’s a real master. Also an elegy for an American existence within nature. The man at the centre of the book lives in a symbiotic relationship with his environment, at a time when America moved from being a nation that lived in nature, to a nation who saw it as its duty to overcome nature. His relationship with the world is very of its time, sadly, but it still has a synchronicity and equivalence, perhaps, to the way Scandinavian people still live. He’s a man of the forest, he’s a man of the trees, he’s a man who is immensely practical and skilled. You can imagine his hands being calloused from tools. He is a craftsman, and in a way he’s mirroring his creator and writer. I’ll say his creator as he would have understood it; it’s quite a God-fearing book in that way. The fact it was written by somebody who’s mainly known for Jesus’ Son , this book of vignettes of junkie life and violence and crazed goings-on is wonderful and just goes to show the author’s range and deep interest in the human condition; his eye and ear for life lived in all its incarnations. This is a very contemplative, beautiful meditation, this book."

"Train Dreams is set in the American West at the start of the 20th century, and it’s about a man called Robert Grainier, a railroad worker. It’s his life, more or less from the beginning until the end, although it does jump around in time. The edition I have is only 116 pages—so he covers a whole life, and a huge amount of social change over that period, in a very short novel. For me, the heart of this novella is a wildfire. Robert Grainier marries and has a daughter, and there is a terrible fire where his cabin burns downs, and he loses both of them. He has no choice but to continue with his life, but carries a huge amount of grief. Eventually he rebuilds his cabin on the site of the old one. And there’s this extraordinary scene which has never left me. I’m not sure if I should give spoilers? Okay, so Grainier believes his daughter is dead. But it turns out that—if what he’s seen is the truth and not simply what he longs to see—his daughter isn’t dead, but rather she has been taken and brought up by wolves. One night the pack comes to the cabin and she’s amongst them, and he sees that she has broken her leg, and he takes her into the cabin and puts it in a splint. She doesn’t recognise him and continues to behave like a wild animal and runs off. This scene affected me so much – that his daughter is alive but he can’t keep her. She has fundamentally changed. What happens to her is never known, and this is how Johnson manages to have so much in such a short novel: by letting the reader fill in the gaps. The whole novella is a masterpiece of intensity, despite it covering so many years. “There’s this extraordinary scene which has never left me” There are odd things, too. Grainier sees the world’s fattest man, and Elvis’s train. Then the last line is absolutely perfect. I wrote it down so that I wouldn’t forget it: “And that time was gone forever.” It sums the whole novella up, somehow. Absolutely."