"Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson

NB: I'm unsure about when and where to best hold these monthly short reading meetings. For now, I'll post them at Common Theory for Saturday mornings. If you'd like to suggest an alternative time or venue, please do so in the comments section below.

Our short reading for January will be the 2012 short novel "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, first published in 2002 in The Paris Review.

Novelist Walter Kirn recently described the book on the America This Week podcast,

Here is a transcript from the podcast:
Walter Kirn: The book is called Train Dreams. It exists now just recently as a movie. I’m not sure how widely it’s distributed. It’s not, I imagine, being given the blockbuster rollout. But I think it’s out there in many theaters and it has a uniformly almost a high rating from all the ratings people. But from the people I trust too and the people of discernment in my family and my circle and literary people and movie fans, it’s just absolutely beloved. Almost uniquely among movies that have come out over the last year or a couple of years. Some people think it’s a masterpiece. Train Dreams is a very short novel, around 100 pages by Denis Johnson, the late great Denis Johnson. He died too young in his late 60s. He was the author of Jesus’ Son, a group of short stories about a knockabout heroin addict in his milieu set in the 70s and 80s.
That book was made into a movie, and it was an indie movie that was pretty dang good. But Jesus’ son was especially important as really, the quintessential creative writing MFA program.
Matt Taibbi: I was going to say, wasn’t he like a big influence on the Raymond Carver type?
Walter Kirn: Raymond Carver’s a little earlier.
Matt Taibbi: Oh, really? Okay.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. So you have to understand this whole creative writing institution in American life. I’ll give you a quick little historical lesson. After World War II, all these American young people came back having had the most intense experience of their life. Experiences of violence, of disorientation, of trauma, of going to other cultures, seeing the rest of the world for the first time, and so on. And one of the wonderful things that the American establishment does is it channels chaos, social chaos, very efficiently. So after World War II, these things were started called creative writing programs, MFA programs, Master of Fine Arts, in the state universities. And one of the goals, even stated goals, though I’m not quite sure where I could look that up, was to allow all these people who had these wild experiences to start turning them into creative works of art. Not to control them, but to guide the pressure that was inevitably going to be released from millions of people having gone all over the world into war.
And creative writing programs in the 1950s tended to flourish in secondary universities like the University of Iowa,. The most famous, Iowa City, Syracuse University in upstate New York. A few others, the University of Michigan. University of Montana in all places. And a certain style grew out of the creative writing realm, the MFA realm. And it was a very American style. It was a little Hemingway.
It prized physical description. It prized, as they used to say, showing over telling. It didn’t reward long disquisitions on what things meant and how society works, and endless characterizations like in a Tolstoy novel of people in epic situations. It was a very vivid, person-based and a resting form of writing. Kurt Vonnegut taught at the University of Iowa after a point. Very famously, he was a beloved professor. If you’ve ever seen those little chalk talks that Kurt Vonnegut used to do about how stories work. You have a man, he falls down a hole, the story is he has to get up out of the hole.
It took what had until then been one of the most mysterious artistic processes in the world, which was how do you write a good story? And in our old American way, we boiled it down to a few basics. A man goes in a hole, he has to climb out of a hole. It applied a few basic principles. Shows use visuals, use sensory imagery, rather than big ideas, and also, be wary of coming to giant moralistic conclusions about things. In a way, it kept America from having some big paroxysm of self-hatred going, “Oh, we just went all over the world and killed people and I lost my innocence, and we’re a bunch of brutes and psychos now and we’re going to have horrible family lives.”
Matt Taibbi: Well, I was going to say, we’ve gone in diametrically the opposite direction as far as that goes.
Walter Kirn: Right. But from this milieu and from this aesthetic that developed, this Denis Johnson came along. And Denis Johnson had some great strengths as a writer of this school. He was extremely vivid. He could say in an image what others took paragraphs to say. He tended to look at the downbeat side of American life. He talked about losers, people who had shitty jobs that they couldn’t hold onto anyway, who drifted along, who often were veterans, had failed relationships. They’re often prey to the temptations of the American lower depths, et cetera. But toward the end of his career, he stopped writing quite in that Gothic mode and he wrote this particular book called Train Dreams, which is singular in that it tells the story of an almost anonymous worker in the woods of Northern Idaho, who we meet when he’s building a bridge, as a great effort is being made to build highway and railroad bridges across the deep mountain valleys of Idaho, and connect it to the rest of the country finally, this last wilderness.
We follow the days and nights of this not well-educated ... Not particularly pre-possessing. He’s not six feet tall, he’s not Paul Bunyan, he’s not the strongest guy. Just working in the woods. He is a naive character building up the American infrastructure. Meets a woman, has a child, experiences tragedy. And in the entirety of this life, which is somehow compressed into these pages, he goes from a guy who is working with Chinese laborers building railroad bridges. Because someone who one day sees Elvis Presley toward the end of his life, go by in a luxurious train car.
We’re now in the new America of pop stars, fame, electronic media, and celebrity. Between those two moments, working on that bridge out in the forest and that almost hallucinogenic spectacle of the great Elvis Presley going through a town, he managed to encapsulate a century of progress or change in a magical and absolutely unprecedented and unexpected way. It wasn’t a lower depth style, Denis Johnson’s story about alcoholics, drug addicts, and so on, sitting around having really chaotic lives where somebody’s ... In general, Denis Johnson’s stories, guys are sitting around and the guy suddenly says, “I just chopped off my fingers.” “Oh, shit! Oh man, does anybody have a beer?” “No, wait, we got to go to the hospital. I chopped my fingers off.” “Well, yeah, but okay, but the car, somebody took the car.” “Oh, dang. Well, we’ll call somebody.” The guy half bleeds out and whatever.
It’s just a bunch of chaos. You’d think a guy like that just was a nihilist. Train Dreams is for ... I think our audience, will be one of the most convincing portraits of the dignity of the human being who doesn’t necessarily have a diploma or a big job or a wonderful life.
It’s a populist fairy tale. Not a fairytale in the sense that none of it’s fake, but a populist fable of great power. Great power. And I’ve read it three times. Everybody who I’ve ever read it to, you can read it aloud, or recommended it to, has really been changed by it. We do a lot of stuff on this show that’s pretty heady, talks about intellectual trends, things to watch out for, political and social anxieties and so on. This is a little different. It’s from the heart and I think we’ll have a lot of fun reading it. I think in its way, it shows you how our country has evolved in good and bad ways rather quickly. And it’s a book with a hero that you can really admire.
A guy like Walter Kirn who gets up in the worst damn flu he’s ever had, with the spirit of Lou Gehrig in his heart, and his dad’s fucking commanding voice in the back of his head saying, “You aren’t bleeding.” He does his job and this man in Train Dreams is a moving character. I think the fact that the movie’s out there for people to go see will add to their interest in it, and the beauty of the language and the simplicity of it will blow you away. There’s a scene in which a man goes through the remains of a large forest fire looking for his home where his child and wife lived, which is both nightmarish and beautiful and haunting, almost unmatched in contemporary literature. So I’m really looking forward to it. Everybody, it is a new book. You’ll have to pay. You won’t be able to get anything less than the cheapest Kindle or whatever. But absolutely have to have it in your library.