When I was younger, I didn’t like short stories. It didn’t feel like enough happened, and they were over just as they were beginning. I wanted something I could sink into – a series of books was even better. But over time, their power grew on me. Authors like Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King and others amazed me with the power that they could fit into fewer words. It was like the pressure of space made for a more powerful impact.
Train Dreams, a novela by Denis Johnson, fits that model. It is a powerful and painful book of fiction about the life of one Robert Grainier, and his life in the as-yet-undeveloped American Northwest in the last 19th and early 20th centuries. Grainier’s life is, for the most part, lonely and tragic, though it is punctuated by the physical beauty of the environment, and the moments of human interaction that make life precious. He marries late, and while off logging, his wife and young daughter are consumed in a wildfire. He lives most of the rest of his life in isolation, with memories of his family, and dies in his forest cabin, not to be found for many months afterwards. He is not an educated or ambitious man, but he is moral in a grounded way.
The novela primarily tracks the years of his life during and shortly after losing his family, and skips over the last 30 years or so in a heartbeat. Perhaps that’s because there was not much to tell as he stays still and the world passes him by. Grainier was an independent man in the classic sense, able to build his own house and live off the land. This was not done to prove a point about independence or autonomy. It was not done in defiance of any authority. It was simply who he was – a man alone. In a sense, a man of his time, and yet one who didn’t change as the times did.
It’s a powerful book whose length is inversely proportionate to its impact.
Just Because I Liked It:
- When one of my kids got bored over the break, he decided to see how long he could hold his breath for (I think he got to a minute). So I showed him this fascinating TED talk by the magician, David Blaine, about how he set the world record for holding one’s breath.