Train Dreams by Denis Johnson: review In his 1992 introduction to The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Richard Ford attacked those Europeans (most of them, apparently) who stereotype his country's literature as "being primarily about brooding male figures alone on a vast, windy continent." As Exhibit A, Ford referred to an "unctuous" essay by Stephen Spender which claimed that "intense loneliness gives all great American literature something in common, the sense of a lonely animal howling in the dark, like wolves." But if Spender were still around to read Train Dreams, he'd surely permit himself a small chuckle of vindication. Not only does the main character regularly brood alone in a landscape whose vastness is constantly emphasised, but his intense loneliness causes him to develop a strange habit: "When he heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth." All of which points to a central dilemma for readers of the book. At times, it feels like a perfect distillation of the kind of American fiction that mixes deadpan prose with flashes of lyricism to tell its haunting tales of the country's outsiders. At others, it feels dangerously like a parody of the same thing. The howler in question is Robert Grainier, who we first meet in the Idaho Panhandle in 1917 where he's helping to build a railroad and murder a Chinaman. The Chinaman escapes, but not before he's yelled what Grainier takes to be a curse - and judging from what happens next, it's not a bad theory. Not long afterwards, Grainier returns home to find that his log cabin, wife and child have been wiped out in a forest fire. And from then until his death in 1968, Grainier essentially potters about a small patch of north-western America, picking up odd jobs, meeting the occasional fellow drifter, but mostly living alone in the woods. In structure, Train Dreams resembles Jesus" Son, Johnson's 1992 short-story collection featuring scenes from the life of a heroin addict that is a fixture in America's many creative-writing classes. On the face of it, the book is a new novella. But, having first appeared in the Paris Review in 2002, it's not all that new - and you could certainly argue that it's not exactly a novella either; more a loose, even random series of vignettes. Most of these are beautifully done, bringing the book's neglected geographical and historical setting vividly to life. Johnson also does a miraculously deft job of signalling how Grainier's increasingly uneventful existence is taking place in a tumultuously changing America. In the early scenes, he's sleeping in a tent from the Civil War. As an older man, he sees Elvis Presley going past on a train. Yet, while Jesus" Son fizzed with a winning combination of comedy and drug-addled sentiment, the writing here too often straddles that awkward line between the impeccably controlled and the slightly flat. Likewise, Grainier is presumably meant to seem like a man trapped in the background of his own life - which he does. Unfortunately, this can't but help make him sometimes seem a bit dull. So it is that Train Dreams alternately soars and bumps its way to a climax that replaces careful social realism with something approaching the magic kind. By all normal rules, this should come as rather a shock. Here, it feels like just one more element thrown into an already peculiar mix. No wonder that by the end it's hard to think of another work of fiction that manages to be quite so short and quite so baggy at the same time. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson 116pp, GRANTA, t £11.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £12.99, ebook £11.14)