Train Dreams

Train Dreams is a novella that was first published in The Paris Review in 2002, but was then released as its own volume last year, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction that was not given. It's a lovely, lyrical look at the American frontier, and how nature both kills and is reborn.

The book concerns Robert Grainier. He's not sure where he came from: "His eldest cousin, a girl, said he'd come from northeast Canada and had spoken only French when they'd first seen him, and they'd had to whip the French out of him to get room for the English tongue. The other two cousins, both boys, said he was a Mormon from Utah. At so early an age it never occurred to him to find out from his aunt and uncle who he was."

Grainier only knows that he arrived by train in the Idaho panhandle in the 1880s. He grows up to marry and father a little girl, and they live in a cabin on the Moyea River. At the book's outset, he is working on a crew making a bridge across the Spokane River, and taking part in a mob trying to throw a Chinese worker to his death for allegedly stealing. The Chinaman gets away, and Robert feels he has been cursed.

A forest fire wipes out his cabin and his family, but he moves back into it and anyway and rebuilds, watching the forest reclaim itself from the fire: "Animals had returned in what was left of the forest. As Grainier drove along in the wagon behind a wide, slow, sand-colored mare, clusters of orange butterflies expanded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees."

A constant theme of Train Dreams is not only rebirth, but death. An old-timer who crawls into holes to detonate dynamite dies, but not as one would expect. Grainier finds a wounded man in a tree, who wants Grainier to tell his story. Grainier transports another man who has been shot by his own dog. An Indian gets run over by a train, his pieces covering a quarter mile of track.

Then there's a segment where Grainier encounters a "wolf-girl," a feral child seemingly raised by wolves. Who that child is not a surprise, but it is still a suspenseful, intriguing bit of writing.

The book is lovely, but since it really a super-long short story, it doesn't pack the emotional wallop of a novel. Grainier lives a long life (until the 1960s) but you can't get the arc of that life in such a short piece. Instead we see snatches of a life. The thing that is constant in his life are trains: "Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train. He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away."