RaveThe Arts FuseGrainier’s story is the story of an ordinary man told in an extraordinary way in extraordinarily spare yet magical prose, and that some of Johnson’s best writing is on display here. It is a book of wonders both real and imagined … All the information is filtered through Grainier in a subtle, understated use of free indirect discourse, and it is Grainier’s consciousness and how that consciousness behaves as a lens through which we look at the past that Johnson wants us to look at … There is a wonderful tipping point in Train Dreams at which Grainier and his world turn from real life people and things into myth, into the long ago, into stuff left stored not even in a book but only, somehow and strangely, in the human imagination.
