Got a job in the Great North Woods: Train Dreams

Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" jumps around a bit in time in the first 4 chapters, as if he's consciously resisting the conventional narrative structure, especially for a novella, that follows a standard chronology - begins with a rather dramatic midlife scene (main character Robert Grainier is 35 or so) on a bridge-construction crew in the great Northwest in about 1910, then next chapters move all around in time - we learn that Grainier lived into his 80s as we get a late scene of him watching a train (see title) in which he sees of all things Elvis Presley. Then story moves back to where first chapter had left off and we get a very dramatic and moving scene in which Grainier walks through the ash-strewn landscape after a massive forest fire - he's searching for the ruins of his house, and we learn that his wife and baby daughter, whom we'd met in first chapter, have died in the fire - and at last the book has some kind of story arc: Grainier's grief, and, perhaps, recovery. He was a lonely, orphaned boy who discovered love relatively late and had happiness for a short time only. A major part of the theme of Train Dreams is one of the oldest in literature: man against nature. Grainier works variously on the bridge crew, building trestles that allow trains (and later cars perhaps) to cut across chasms, and also on logging crews, stripping the forest and changing the landscape all around him - man conquers nature, but nature resists inevitably, as in the fire and in the death we see when a logger is felled by a fallen branch, a "widowmaker." This short work takes on the vast theme of how the human presence alters everything in the natural world and how our lives are shaped by nature.