Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

The wrong books get filmed adaptations, much of the time.

I'm curious enough about the Netflix version of Denis Johnson's 2002 novella Train Dreams that I'll watch it, even though the book club tells me that there've been many significant changes (complete with entirely invented scenes, and scenes whose outcomes are very different from the book), in large part because this novel might look like it was written with someone like me in mind.

Find me another book blogger who writes as often as I do about logging, for example, I dare you.

This is a novel about the life and death of a man in the Pacific Northwest forests, abandoned both by and to the fates. He arrives in Idaho on a train in 1893, with a Paddington-style tag explaining where he should get off, but he doesn't know his family or his age, and he lives most of his life alone. He spends some time logging, some time laying rail lines, and many years basically self-sufficiently foraging alone. He encounters strangenesses of many kinds, from the World's Fattest Man in the 1950s, to Elvis in a railcar, to a slow-dying murdered rapist confessing his sins, and oh, does it all ever weigh heavily on him by the end.

And then he dies.

So I'll watch it, and I'm expecting to find myself enraptured. I'm delighted to know that some readers have been moved to tears either by the novel or by the movie, and it's the kind of book (and presumably movie) that captures in amber a past time that'll soon be utterly foreign to everyone encountering it, and I'm nowhere near begrudging either of these texts its success. But among all the novels, and with the time seeming so short for civilization (or is it only me who's feeling like cultural doom is an actual possibility at this point?), it's not one I'd choose to adapt.

Men are often terrible, wild places are unforgiving, and while it's possible to live a quiet life, sometimes the noise comes to you regardless. These are some of the key themes of frontier-related fiction, and that's what Johnson's written here, and what he's given us in the person of Robert Grainier. It's remarkable, but for reasons I can't articulate, I don't have the kind or number or remarks that I expected to have before cracking the cover.