![]() ![]() The windows and roof he left for later, when he could get some milled lumber. ![]() In time, resigned to the emptiness, he builds a new, eighteen-by-eighteen-foot cabin near the site of his old house: “In a month he’d raised four walls nearly eight feet in height. ![]() Witless with grief, he camps nearby, hoping perhaps that the absent will return. A fire has devastated the area: Grainier’s house is ash, and his family is missing. In the summer of 1920, Robert Grainier returns from working on the railroad in northwestern Washington to join his wife and small child, who have been living in the backwoods of Idaho. The protagonist of Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux $18) needs just enough to be buried alive in. “How much land does a man need?” Tolstoy asked, in his well-known fable of that name. Denis Johnson Illustration by PAUL HAMLYN ![]()
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