A Steady Man in an Unsteady World

  by Tom Goodman

This month's entry at Heroes, Heroines, and History is a post from my monthly newsletter. I open each newsletter with a story from turn-of-the-century Texas, or a quick review of a book or film from that place and time. Train Dreams does not come from that place, but it comes from that time. If you love historical fiction, and if you aspire to write it well, Train Dreams its worth adding to your list of books to read and films to watch.

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Robert Grainier is a steady man.

That’s the way the novelist, Denis Johnson, described him in his novella, Train Dreams. That’s the way he’s presented in the film by the same title, too. 

Much of the story revolves around his labor in the Idaho timber industry in the opening years of the 1900s. When he meets a woman (at church) and they have a daughter, he finds renewed purpose in his hard work.

A steady man, then. 

But a steady man in the midst of things beyond his control or comprehension.

In his own interior world, he can never quite resolve the regret for his role in an unjust act against a Chinese laborer. Nor can he settle his grief at losing his young family to a forest fire.

Things are beyond his control or comprehension in the world around him, as well. The stunning beauty and sudden danger of the forest in which he works is a point hard to miss.

In the film, he gains an ever-widening realization of just how vast this beautiful, baffling world is. 

In one scene, he stands with a friend on a forest service lookout tower and scans miles of the forest where he worked. 

In aother scene, he takes a single-engine plane flight to “see the world as only the birds do.” 

Then in 1962, as an old man, he watches through a department store window as a television displays John Glenn’s first images of Earth as seen from space. “Is that--?” he asks a stranger watching the television next to him. “That’s us,” she replies.

Train Dreams is the only book of Johnson’s that I’ve read, so far. I’m told many of the characters in his other novels and short stories are erratic and eccentric.  

Not Robert Grainier. He moves through all the experiences of his life with what one movie reviewer called a “strapping stoicism.” 

The fact that he cannot make sense of it all does not lead him to conclude that this life is meaningless.

The late Denis Johnson—a complicated Christian—once told a reporter for New York magazine, “What I write about is really the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking: Why is it like this if there’s supposed to be a God?” 

I read Train Dreams while I was writing my forthcoming novel. Since my story is set in East Texas timber, it made sense to read Johnson's story set in Idaho timber during the same era. I’m editing the manuscript now, and it occurs to me that a version of Robert Grainier found his way into my story somewhere along the way. One of the characters has that same stoic steadiness. 

Give Johnson’s story a look (book; film). And be on the lookout for my novel, Through Many Dangers, later this year. To find out when it drops, subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Facebook.

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A deadly train stunt. A pistol-packing preacher. A UFO crash in 1897. A town that outlawed dancing. In Ten Texas Tales, you'll find stories like this from turn-of-the-century Texas. I mine that seam of history for my novels and for anecdotes to put in my monthly newsletter. Each month, I’ll give you nuggets of history, recommended books and films, and behind-the-scenes looks at my novels.