Needing to cleanse my reading palate after The Sparrow, and not having a specific destination in mind, I got pounced upon by Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson. A short book (~115 pages) with a wide reputation, it’s one of those books that have been looking up at me from my TBR pile for a while, waiting for the right moment. You’re not ready yet.
Boy, I loved it. Following a railroad worker in the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century, the book is a strangely immersive experience. A humorous, sad, mundane, and gorgeous witness to the main character’s life from youth to lonely passing. Johnson’s prose conjures a disarming narrator that pulled me back and forth from reality to dream with the same voice. More than once I was like, Huh? Okay. I guess that really happened? Then I realized it didn’t matter. Shut up, monkey mind.
Final comment on Train Dreams. When I closed the book, I felt like Johnson was the distant, more cheerful literary cousin of Cormac McCarthy. Same ability to startle a reader with a handful of words—a description of the landscape, a character’s realization, or a stab at how the universe might really work. But none of the Gnostic doom.