Train Dreams - Denis Johnson

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was not awarded this year although three books were nominated in the far from clear or foolproof conditions in which the prize is generally made. 

It was the Pulitzer Board that decided not to present the fiction award, and not the jury, which selected the three nominated works for consideration by the board. In fact, all three jurors have expressed dissatisfaction over the outcome as well as the Pulitzer selection process itself.

No fiction published in 2011 was felt worthy by the Pulitzer Board although one of the nominees was Karen Russell's Swamplandia  and another was David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.  

It may be that Russell's novel might not have lived up to the promise of her short story collection debut, and Wallace's novel is unfinished, and I don't recall anyone saying it is his greatest work - perhaps, it might have been on its way there: a steep mountain to climb, that one. 

Annual prize-givings are a crude way to adjudicate the state of fiction - they help market literary novels and give a guide to readers/buyers as to what is thought to be current, and that is about as far as they can ever really go. 

It may be that 2011 was a dud year in fiction - there must be some dud years, after all - but it is based on the assumption that we read novels in the same way we read newspapers - to find out what is happening now. We don't. Of the eight books I have read this month, only one was published this year - the rest span from 2011 to 1852 - thank you, Mr. Dickens. Readers have a longer run at fiction than these shindigs and shenanigans attest.

The third nominee is proof of this. This was  Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, which was published as a long short story in the  Paris Review in 2002, and last year was  packaged in the US as a novella, and, it seems, elsewhere before this in 2006. Not yet published in the UK, it is, however, available as an audiobook read by Will Patton alongside the stories from Jesus' Son. I read it in 2005.

Whether the novella is greatly different from the story, I can't say - it may be its once 50 odd pages of short story can be spread across 100+ pages of creamy white wide-margined paper and sold as such without much more being added.  I would want nothing to be taken away from it, and any additional sentences from Denis Johnson are to be savoured.
What I can say is that  'Train Dreams' or Train Dreams, at whatever length, is a remarkable product in any year or decade: a tale of wolves and trains and revenants that calls to mind  Hemingway and Faulkner and Alice Munro and Henry James and Cormac McCarthy while also being very distinctly its own wayward and brilliantly conceived self.
I read it again and it improves - although (and I think this may be a common effect of reading it) it has grown in the mind but in that miraculous way that  still matches the memory of reading it. There is the epic grasp - it is about America - and, while it seems always to be wavering, the seeming contrary of its intense focus on one character, a character not wholly yielding to such a gaze; and there is the wife, a ghost returning and granting him a vision of how she might have died,  a midnight garden full of wolves, a wolf-girl, her broken leg, her escape, pulling at the splint he has made for her, and the comedy of two marriage proposals, one gracelessly made, another gracefully refused. And how so much about this life would have gone unnoticed but for its author: it obeys Robert Bresson's injunction to 'Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.'