Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Official Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

After a nearly two month adventure that was Lonesome Dove, I decided that I needed a change. Not necessarily a change in content, but more a change in delivery, structure, and length.

Enter: Train Dreams, a novel that I’m still trying to wrap my head around as I begin typing this review.

The novel centers around the life of Robert Grainer, an ordinary laborer trying to survive and endure life in the early 1900’s, navigating a life of a loss and fatigue and trying to make sense of it all. The title, Train Dreams, feels especially accurate for this novel. As I read it, I felt almost like I was dreaming, sliding across time, memory, and half-formed moments, with one man at the center of it all. I don’t know if all of it quite landed for me, but overall, I found it to be interesting if nothing else. I ended this book with more of a respect for the craft rather than a love of the characters and story. Let’s get into it.

SPOILERS BELOW:

It’s hard to discuss this novel chronologically, because it doesn’t read chronologically. The novel opens in the early 1900s, then moves backward to Grainer’s birth, then back forward again. If I had to summarize it, I’d say that the story unfolds as a series of snapshots and moments recalled out of order, hazy and incomplete, like memory itself.

What’s interesting most to me as a reader was the fact that I didn’t even really think I was enjoying this book until the end. So much of it felt disjointed, disconnected, random sprints of memory told in a way that left me wondering: “Okay, so what is the point?”

Much of this novel is told in that seemingly disjointed kind of way, especially after the loss of Grainer’s wife and young daughter. When he arrives home after a work trip, he finds his cabin and nearby woods burned to the ground, and his wife and daughter are gone. The disjoined, hazy storytelling that follows can be looked at as being caused by grief, loss, and loneliness. In a way, the writing style is brilliant, though I didn’t appreciate it at first.

This is why, when Robert Grainer hears rumblings about a “wolf-girl” running around in the woods, I initially took it as just another crazy story. Sort of like the story of a Native American who was tricked into drinking for the first time and died because he passed out on some train tracks or his friend who dies when a tree branch falls on him.

But then, we get the pivotal scene. Grainer encounters the wolf-girl, and brings her back to his place in the woods.

“Kate, is it you?”

The novel refuses to clarify what’s real. Is this truly his daughter? A hallucination? A projection of unresolved grief? We never know. Grainer sets her broken leg, and she disappears, never to be seen again.

Train Dreams was such a unique reading experience, especially after Lonesome Dove. It shows that there is truly something engaging in brevity, and that a 130 page novella can make you think and wonder just as much as a 1000 page epic. But overall, the reading experience has me feeling that this was just short of a 5 star read, so 4 stars it is.

Onto the next one.

-KF