RavePloughsharesDenis Johnson’s new novella, Train Dreams—a brilliantly imagined elegy to the lost wilderness of the early 20th-century Idaho Panhandle and the ‘hard people of the northwest mountains’ who occupied it—focuses on the life story of one such hard person, Robert Grainier … Grainer goes from being ‘a steady man,’ content with his small family and work on timber and bridge-building crews, to being a loner who resettles on the site of his old cabin … Grainier’s wild howling illuminates one of the book’s guiding premises: that those who built the northwest did not just conquer the wilderness but were conquered and absorbed by it in turn … If Train Dreams imagines a kind of Manifest Destiny in reverse, it remains at heart a gorgeous song of praise for the northwest’s chastened white settlers—a song sung in a more subdued but arguably more powerful lyrical voice than fans of Jesus’ Son will remember.
