Train Dreams is slight by design, but don't let me get you thinking that means it's insubstantial; its spareness descends far past these descriptors. It's more like a misheard rumour, torn-up half-pages of a years-old newspaper, maybe even just the dust drifting after the dirt has been set over a newly-filled grave. Robert Grainier's life is splattered all over this minuscule wordcount, and it's one of learned unimportance and sinking meaninglessness; not to be confused with emptiness. The book is, in essence, a demonstration of how impossible it is to reconcile the arbitrary and aimless nature of things that we can't help but feel so deeply about. Grainger has no capacity for expressing himself, and though Johnson keeps us at a steady remove from him, we still get to watch as the tides of pain and pleasure roll over him; so quietly, maybe even for just a sentence, but so affecting are they to Grainger that he cannot bear to spare a thought for them. And they just come, and come, and then they stop. What is a life, if not a sorry assortment of losses and wins and loves and hopes and dreams and thoughts that would appear unfortunate were they to escape the confines of their home? The rare gift supplied here is that Johnson gives to Grainger the sense of, not quite meaning, not quite purpose, maybe just feeling, that our sorry lives hold for ourselves. Thus, we get to see this flailing process of personal meaning-making without the muddying layers of self and society. You close the book, a whisp of a thing, sometimes even random in its layout, though with a perfect button, and no time at all has passed since you picked it up, and you inevitably come to think "that's it?" and, yeah, it is. That really is it.