Review: "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson

 

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson Picador, 2012   Johnson’s novella, which was published originally in The Paris Review in 2002, captures the transformative years of the early-20th Century in the Northwest United States. A time when industrialization and technology—telephones, automobiles, electricity, and then television—overran the isolation of the American West. It is told in the form of one Robert Grainier. Grainier, born in 1883, was orphaned as a boy and raised by his aunt and uncle in Idaho’s panhandle. His cousins have differing stories about how his parents died, and even how (or if) he is related to their own family. Robert failed to ask his aunt and uncle his genesis story while they were living and so Grainier, without ever really knowing who he is, makes his way in a changing world. The tale begins in 1917 with Robert caught up in a group of railway workers attempting to kill a Chinese laborer for stealing from the company—an act he regrets all his life. Robert, as his way, then moves on to lumberjacking before acquiring his own rig, a wagon and two horses, for his own freight hauling service. Along the way Robert marries, has a child, but never really stops being alone. Train Dreams is an astonishingly vivid tale about the American West. It is lonely and melancholy, lyrical and realistic. Grainier’s murky ancestral roots, or his lack of predestined identity, is a perfect metaphor for the 18th and early-19th Century West where a man could, at least mythically, disappear and reinvent themselves. Robert’s solitary lifestyle allows him to act as an observer of a changing culture and landscape while giving him an almost immutable place in this world. There is a sad tenderness to Train Dreams, but Robert Grainier’s lonely passage across the pages provides a rich and realistic drama and even brings a little meaning to our own lives. *                *                * One of my goals for 2025 is to expand my leisure reading beyond the genres where I usually spend time. Train Dreams fits nicely in contemporary literature, with an exquisite western flair that will appeal to most male readers. It is the kind of book that reads easily (and that’s a compliment), but can also be read deeply.

Check out Train Dreams at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "The Moon is Down" by John Steinbeck

 

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck Penguin, 1995   John Steinbeck wrote The Moon is Down, as an anti-Nazi propaganda piece for the U.S. Foreign Information Service (FIS)—which means it is one of Steinbeck’s minor works but it is far from lifeless propaganda and very much worth reading as literature. It was rejected by the FIS because it believed its depiction of an American town occupied by a foreign power would demoralize American readers during the early days of World War 2. Steinbeck reworked the setting, placing it in a nameless town in a nameless European country, but—as Donald V. Coers wrote in his Introduction to the edition I read—a place “cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France.” It was published by The Viking Press in 1942, and clandestine editions—The Moon is Down was illegal in all occupied Europe—were distributed throughout the continent (including Norway, Holland, The Netherlands, and France) and in smaller numbers in China as it fought against fascist Japan. Steinbeck had intended The Moon is Down “as a celebration of the durability of democracy” and it succeeded. The Town is overrun by conquering soldiers with only a whisper—a Quisling-like businessman had arranged for its small contingent of soldiers and its mayor to be away at the precise time of the invasion. The townspeople are stunned into something like a stupor. No one knows what to do. No one talks. Rather they walk in the streets with their faces turned down, their minds numbed with shock. The invaders came for the town’s coal mine and it is imperative it speed up the processing and coal shipments for the war effort. But as days and weeks pass, the Town’s citizenry regains their balance and begin rebelling in small ways. They are always polite to the invaders, but never friendly; a strategy that intensifies the loneliness and misery of the occupying soldiers. Their work in the mine is intentionally slow and when they can, they make small sabotages. The Moon is Down—a title borrowed from MacBeth—truly is a celebration of democracy. The townspeople are rendered with realism—there are collaborators, cowards, profiteers, and resistors. Rather than dehumanizing the invading soldiers, Steinbeck paints them in a genuine manner, as simple men following orders with a mindless allegiance to an authoritarian system. A system with a single head and no room for its subjects to question their great leader’s portrayal of reality. The Moon is Down is as relevant today as when it was written so many decades ago. It has the power to build morale in our darkening world where fascism and authoritarianism are rising. It is a blueprint for quiet defiance. And it showcases fascism’s primary flaw—an inability for anyone other than the leader to think—which is the opposite of democracy’s greatest strength.

Find The Moon is Down on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

This is review is for a book different from the usual fare at Gravetapping, but it is a marvelous and important novel that satisfies on every level of good literature. It entertains, it educates, it illuminates.

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is as brilliant as it is uncomfortable. Elwood Curtis, a black teenager living in 1960s Tallahassee, is sent to a segregated reform school, The Nickel Academy, after the police catch him in a stolen car. Elwood was hitchhiking for the first day of his early-entry college class in the next town, when the car thief picked him up. His pleas of innocence go nowhere with the police or the judge.

Nickel’s staff trade the boys’ state allotted food to local businesses for kickbacks. They beat and whip any of the “students” perceived as trouble-makers. A few of the boys disappear into unmarked graves after severe beatings, the staff claiming they ran away. The boys are offered to local bigwigs as free labor. The pedophiles on staff have unlimited access to the boys.

The school’s degrading atmosphere is more than Elwood can stand. He wants to fight, in a similar way that his hero Martin Luther King Jr. confronts segregation and racism, but the more he struggles against Nickel, the harder his life becomes. The Jim Crow South setting is vividly drawn, uncomfortable, and for this naïve reader, startling. Elwood's journey from a hopeful boy, listening to King’s sermons in his grandmother’s house, to his descent into Nickel is both tragic and disturbing.

The Nickel Boys is fiction, but it was inspired by the very real Dozier School for Boys, which operated in Marianna, Florida, between 1900 and 2011. The beatings, killings, and everything else actually happened at Dozier, but the story and the characters are the invention of Whitehead.

THE QUIET AMERICAN by Graham Greene

Penguin Trade Paperback Edition

I haven’t read much Graham Greene, but the few novels I have read—generally with years in between—I have enjoyed.  And with every novel I read, without fail, I wonder why I don’t read more of his work.  I recently read his Vietnam novel, The Quiet American.  It was originally published in 1955 and it literarily documents, through the actions of a young American agent, the seeds of the United States’ entry, as combatants, into Vietnam.

The Quiet American is told in first person by an aging British newspaper journalist named Thomas Fowler.  The novel’s opening scene has the arrival of a French policeman with news of the murder of one of Fowler’s friends.  A young American named Alden Pyle.  Pyle worked for the U. S. Economic Aid Mission in Saigon.  He is an idealist who believes it is both possible the U. S. can foster democracy in Vietnam.

Pyle’s knowledge of Vietnam is based on the work of a journalist named York Harding who has written several works about communism in Asia.  Harding wrote of a “Third Force”—something like the partisans in Nazi-occupied Europe in World War Two—that could rally the people into a popular rising for democracy.  The only problem, Vietnam is not Europe and the world is never as simple as we would like it.

The Quiet American is a prescient novel.  It was published 10 years prior to the first major U. S. battle in Vietnam, Ia Drang, but it deftly and accurately defines many of the problems the United States faced in Vietnam.  It explores the gung-ho naïveté with which the U. S. Government entered the country.  It foretells the debacle U. S. intelligence services would create with their secret wars and covert operations.  But the most interesting is its view of America and Americans as innocents unfamiliar with the world beyond its own borders.

It is rich with both historical perspective and its contemporary world.  The author obviously loved Vietnam; it is painted with a tapestry of vivid description and loving detail.  It is a literary thriller—in the best sense of that term.  It is a story first, but Graham Greene expertly weaves ideas, characters and truths into the narrative in a manner that they become an intricate and necessary part of the story.

The Quiet American is also a metaphor for the end of the British Empire and the rise of America as a superpower, and essentially an empire.  Pyle is the new—he is young, strong and full of ideas and ideals.  Fowler is the old—he is cynical, knowledgeable and somewhat world weary and frightened.  He is scared of age, but mostly he is frightened of losing his status and potency as a man.

The Quiet American is a wonderful novel.  The writing is smooth with a certain antiseptic feel—the reader views the events very much as a spectator, but the performance is so compelling it envelopes the reader with its dark and cynical view of how things are.  Its view of America is rough, but it is done in a way that is forgiving and understanding; almost as a parent disapproving the actions of a child.

The Quiet American is the best Vietnam novel I have read.  It is appealing as both a suspense novel and literature.  Its themes are as relevant today as they were in the 1950s and the story (the plotting, the description and setting) is brilliantly executed.  If you haven’t read this novel you should.

After Thought.  The Quiet American has been translated into film two times.  The first was Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1958 film starring Audie Murphy and Michael Redgrave as Pyle and Fowler.  The second was Phillip Noyce’s 2002 version starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser as Fowler and Pyle.  Michael Caine was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Thomas Fowler.

I haven’t seen the original film, but the Noyce version is surprisingly good.  It captures the spirit and atmosphere of the novel very well.    

This review originally appeared on the now defunct blog Dark City Underground August 11, 2010 in slightly different form.  I will be moving a few other reviews from DCU to Gravetapping over the next several weeks.  I will also be posting some original content very soon.

I. ASIMOV: A MEMOIR

Bantam Paperback Edition

Shortly after Isaac Asimov’s death in 1992 his memoir I. Asimov was released by Doubleday.  It is a series of essays Asimov wrote, seemingly, from the narrative and the date of its publication, on his death bed.  The book meanders—it starts at childhood, but jumps forward to his early writing career, and then back.  It is a patchwork of related postcards rather than a chronological narrative of his life, and it works very well.  

The essays run about four or five pages—sometimes longer, sometimes shorter—and cover a specific event, person, or idea.  He discusses his early life in detail; specifically, working in his parent’s Brooklyn candy store as a boy surrounded by the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, which he wasn’t allowed to read until he convinced his father the science fiction magazines were about science. 

The bulk of the book is devoted to his literary life, which, in his own estimation was his life.  In several sections of the book he wrote he would rather write than anything else.  He did not enjoy travel, and while he did enjoy the company of others, he did not tend to seek it out, and, especially in his early years, he had difficulty getting along and making friends. 

He touches on his major works—The Foundation series—specifically the original trilogy—“Nightfall,” “The Ugly Little Boy” and many others.  He freely admits he enjoyed writing nonfiction more than fiction, and in fact, he considered himself a much more accomplished writer of nonfiction.  A sentiment I tend to agree with; however I enjoyed the original Foundation trilogy immensely when I read it as a teenager.

The most interesting essays in I. Asimov are the short pieces he wrote about his experiences with other science fiction writers.  He had lifelong relationships with many writers, some of whom were part of the science fiction fan club The Futurians.  The Futurians, as Asimov describes it, was an off shoot of the Queens Science Fiction club.  The split occurred because the Queens club wanted science fiction to keep itself above politics, and specifically not speak out against fascism, which was spreading across Europe at the time, and The Futurians wanted fascism denounced.   The Futurians included Frederick Pohl, who has written extensively about the club on his blog at (http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/), Cyril M. Kornbluth, and Donald A. Wollheim. 

He also writes admiringly of John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction (ASF), who gave Asimov his first real hope of publishing his science fiction stories and also, later, gave him the idea for his short story “Nightfall”.  The seed for the story came from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay titled “Nature”.  

Asimov seemingly knew everyone writing science fiction in the 1940s through the 80s.  A few of the more interesting comments Asimov makes about his contemporaries follows.

H. L. Gold.  Gold was the editor of Galaxy; a top tier science fiction magazine where Asimov placed several stories.  Gold was an ill-tempered editor, who changed story narratives and titles, and replied with meanness when the authors objected.  Galaxy serialized Asimov’s novel The Stars, Like Dust and changed the title to Tyrann; “Worst of all was his [Gold had a] pernicious habit of writing insulting rejection letters.”              

Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein is considered the father of modern science fiction, and Asimov worked with him during World War II, as a civilian employee of the Naval Air Experimental Station (NAES) in Philadelphia.  Asimov wrote that he and Heinlein had an uneven friendship.  He quipped about Heinlein: 

“…although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far-right conservative immediately afterward.  This happened at just the time he changed wives from liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far right conservative woman, Virginia.”

Clifford D. Simak.  In 1938 when Asimov was still a teenager he wrote a letter to ASF regarding Simak’s story “Rule 18”; he didn’t like the story much.  Simak wrote a polite letter to Asimov inquiring what he didn’t like about the story.  In response to Simak’s letter Asimov wrote:

“…I promptly reread [it]…and I found, to my intense embarrassment, that it was a very good story and that I liked it.”  

I. Asimov doesn’t have the depth and detail of an autobiography.  It has the feel of a congenial conversation, but it seemingly reveals his character, and he makes a point to highlight his flaws.  It is an appealing book written by one of science fiction’s most well known writers, and it is more entertaining and enlightening than I would have imagined.