Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Trains typically go directly from one place to another. And while they may pass through some nice countrysides, it is more often than not, a direct route. Unlike trains, Train Dreams, the Pulitzer Price fiction nominee by Denis Johnson, takes a meandering route to get from its begimning to its end.

Train Dreams charts the life of Robert Grainier beginning in 1917 when he, along with several other railway workers, almost throws a Chinese laborer off an in-process railroad tressle. It travels forward to a fire that guts the town he resides in, destroying his cabin in the woods. His wife, Gladys, and daughter, Kate, are not seen again. It reverses course and describes his childhood living with his aunt, uncle and cousins, having lost his parents at an early age. It then forges ahead to his later, solitary years.

Train Dreams resembles more a meandering river than the fast moving steel wheels for which Robert worked for a time. This spare novelette, a mere 115 pages, is interesting and literary. You can picture Robert reminiscing, at the end of his long life, about random events. Even though the novel doesn’t mention this, you can picture him sitting on his front porch in a rocking chair letting his mind wander, letting thoughts in no particular order enter and exit his memories. In some ways, Train Dreams is quite satisfying in its brevity. In other ways, readers might want more. Which reader will you be?