Wikipedia Deep Dive

Train Dreams

9 min read

In 1917, a group of railroad workers tried to throw a Chinese laborer off a bridge in the Idaho Panhandle. They accused him of stealing from the company stores. He escaped. One of those workers, Robert Grainier, walked home that evening to his wife and infant daughter, stopped to buy a bottle of sarsaparilla, and thought he glimpsed the Chinese man in the woods. He became convinced he'd been cursed.

This is how Denis Johnson opens Train Dreams, and everything that follows unfolds from that moment of cruelty and superstition—a whole American life compressed into barely a hundred pages.

A Life in Miniature

Johnson's novella, published in 2011 but originally appearing in The Paris Review in 2002, traces Robert Grainier's existence from the late nineteenth century to his death in 1968. It is, by any measure, a small life. Grainier arrives as an orphan in Idaho in 1893, works the railroads and timber camps, marries late, loses everything to fire, and spends his remaining decades alone in a rebuilt cabin in the Moyea Valley.

The book won an O. Henry Award and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. It was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize—a prize that wasn't awarded to anyone that year, the jury having declined to name a winner.

That non-decision feels almost fitting. Train Dreams is a book that resists easy categorization, a work that literary critic James Wood called "a severely lovely tale." It operates in a strange territory between frontier realism and something approaching myth.

The West Before It Was Tamed

To understand the world Grainier inhabits, you need to picture the Idaho Panhandle at the turn of the twentieth century. This is the narrow strip of Idaho that juts up between Washington and Montana, a landscape of dense forests and deep valleys where the Great Northern Railway was pushing its iron lines through wilderness.

Grainier witnesses the mass deportation of Chinese families from his town. He watches two settlements—Fry and Eatonville—merge to become Bonners Ferry. He sees men die in tunnel collapses and falling-branch accidents. The railroad builders were carving civilization into a place that didn't want it, and the human cost was simply accepted.

Johnson renders this world in prose so spare it almost hurts. Anthony Doerr, reviewing the book for The New York Times, wrote that Johnson builds "from the ashes of Grainier's life a tender, lonesome and riveting story, an American epic writ small."

That phrase—"an American epic writ small"—captures something essential about the novella's strange power.

The Fire

The central catastrophe comes in 1920. Grainier has been away in Washington, repairing the Robinson Gorge Bridge and cutting timber for the Simpson Company. He returns to Idaho to find that a massive wildfire has consumed the valley.

His cabin is gone. His wife Gladys is gone. His daughter Kate is gone.

Johnson doesn't linger on the moment of discovery. He moves forward in time, showing us Grainier returning to the site the following spring, feeling his wife's spirit in the ruins. One night by the river, he sees her white bonnet "sailing past" above him—a detail that could be supernatural or could be grief-induced hallucination. Johnson never clarifies, and the ambiguity is the point.

Grainier takes in a stray red dog. He rebuilds his cabin. He befriends a Kootenai Indian named Bob, who dies after ranch hands trick him into drinking alcohol for the first time and he wanders onto the train tracks. The losses accumulate quietly.

A Ghost Story That Might Not Be

Years later, Grainier is visited by a figure of his wife Gladys. She tells him what happened: she fell and broke her back on the rocks by the river. Before she drowned, she unknotted her bodice to allow baby Kate to crawl away and escape.

This visitation could be a dream. It could be madness. It could be supernatural. Johnson presents it without commentary, letting the reader decide what kind of story they're reading.

But then comes the wolf-girl.

Grainier hears rumors for years about a feral child living in the wilderness. One night, when he's old and arthritic, a pack of wolves appears at his cabin. Among them is a girl—wild, growling, walking on all fours. Grainier becomes convinced this is Kate, his daughter, somehow survived and raised by wolves.

She lets him splint her broken leg. She sleeps in his cabin. In the morning, she leaps through the window and vanishes forever.

Is this real? Is this what actually happens in the story?

Johnson gives no answers. The wolf-girl is presented with the same matter-of-fact prose as the railroad construction and the timber cutting. Either everything in Train Dreams is realistic, or nothing is.

The Hemingway Question

Critics have spilled considerable ink comparing Johnson's style to Ernest Hemingway's. The resemblance is obvious: the short declarative sentences, the suppressed emotion, the suggestion of vast depths beneath a simple surface.

Literary critic Anthony Wallace praised Johnson as "a very good Hemingway disciple, perhaps even a great one," noting that "the true, simple declarative sentence is alive and well here." Johnson conveys his protagonist's inner life indirectly, through action and implication rather than explicit statement.

But James Wood, while admiring the prose, offered a gentle caveat. Sometimes, he wrote, "after the beautiful monotonies of Hemingway, one longs to bathe in impurities—to take on the luxuries and rough excesses of a more abundant style."

There's a risk, Wood suggested, that "a reticent avoidance of sentimentality can itself prove sentimental." The very spareness of Train Dreams might be its limitation as well as its strength.

What the Critics Saw

The reception was overwhelmingly positive. Publishers Weekly called the novella "the synthesis of Johnson's epic sensibilities rendered in miniature in the clipped tone of Jesus' Son"—referring to Johnson's celebrated 1992 short story collection about drug addicts and drifters.

Alan Warner, writing in The Guardian, focused on the book's deeper questions: "Softly and beautifully, this novel asks a profound question of human life: is the cost of human society and so-called civilisation perhaps just too high?"

In Ploughshares, Jocelyn Lieu described it as "a brilliantly imagined elegy to the lost wilderness of the early 20th-century Idaho Panhandle."

And Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times declared flatly that Train Dreams "is a masterpiece which should have won him the Pulitzer Prize but was short-listed in a year that the jury decided not to award it."

The Roar in the Darkness

The novella's strangest moment comes near its end, though it's actually a memory from 1935. Grainier attends a sideshow to see a "wolf-boy"—a human being displayed as a curiosity, as was common in that era of traveling carnivals and freak shows.

The audience laughs at the wolf-boy.

Then the boy opens his mouth and releases a roar. Johnson describes it as terrifying and primordial, a sound that fills the entire room. The audience falls silent. Everything goes dark.

"And the moment is gone forever."

That's how Johnson ends the scene, and it might be the key to the whole book. Something ancient and uncivilized persists beneath the railroad lines and the company stores and the orderly progression of American history. Grainier glimpses it throughout his life—in the curse he imagines, in his dead wife's floating bonnet, in the wolf-girl who might be his daughter. And in that sideshow tent, he hears it roar.

The Mystery of a Life

Anthony Wallace offered what might be the most insightful reading of Grainier's story:

Grainier's life is a mystery from start to finish, a sort of blank space that he fills in and that we fill in with him. At the core of such fiction is the conviction that our lives will remain essentially mysterious to us—that as human beings we don't know what we are and cannot grasp our own experience.

But Wallace sees hope rather than despair in this uncertainty. Johnson seems to suggest, he writes, "that we need not understand our own lives in order to live them, enjoy them, fully inhabit them—and also that we might take some comfort in that, if in anything at all."

Grainier works. He builds. He loses. He rebuilds. He takes in stray dogs and attends sideshows and rides a biplane once, in 1927, just to see what it's like. He dies in his sleep in November 1968, and his body isn't discovered until the following spring, when hikers stumble across his cabin.

It's not a triumphant ending. It's barely an ending at all. But it's a completed life, fully inhabited despite—or perhaps because of—its mystery.

From Page to Screen

In 2025, a film adaptation of Train Dreams premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Clint Bentley and written by Bentley with Greg Kwedar, the film stars Joel Edgerton as Grainier, with Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon, William H. Macy, and Clifton Collins Jr. in supporting roles.

Netflix acquired the film for streaming release—a fitting home, perhaps, for a story about isolation and the vast spaces of the American West.

Whether the adaptation captures the novella's uncanny power remains to be seen. Johnson's prose achieves its effects through what it withholds, through the gaps between sentences where meaning accumulates. Translating that to visual storytelling is no simple task.

But the story of Robert Grainier—the orphan, the laborer, the widower, the man who might have splinted his feral daughter's leg in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness—continues to find new audiences. Nearly a quarter century after its first publication, Train Dreams endures.

Perhaps that's because its central mystery is everyone's mystery. We don't know what we are. We can't fully grasp our own experience. And yet we live anyway, filling in the blank spaces as best we can, until the moment is gone forever.