Robert Grainier is the protagonist; he is not merely what he appears on the surface to be: a day laborer of great strength, Spartan determination, virtually without education — he is above all, simple.
He represents a generation and a tradition of American men in the as-yet-undeveloped great West who struggled through to their unnoticed deaths after surviving the first World War. The building of railroads exemplifies the furious drive and physical effort involved in the enormous task of unlocking a continent.
The opening scene in 1917 is horrifying. Without a single historian’s comment, the reader is shown the distrust and cruelty of ignorant and brutalized men towards immigrants — in particular, the Chinese — during the westward expansion. Most readers will immediately recall from many sources what they’ve learned of those days in mining camps in California, Alaska, along the West Coast, where the essential Chinese laborers emigrated and were systematically persecuted.
In the attempt of a group of men to toss a 'Chinaman' who can speak no English from the framework of a bridge to his certain death, Robert Grainier just escapes sharing the guilt of the others. Early in the story we are informed that he is a kind of innocent whose sins will surely develop from the evil outside himself. He is nearly caught in society’s web of herd instinct, but not quite.
Robert has enough schooling to manage arithmetic on paper, to read, and just barely to state facts. Feelings are beyond his ability to articulate, but Johnson makes it wonderfully clear how deeply Robert embodies the most profound emotions we know.
This is a bare-bones biographical narrative that begins in Robert’s young manhood and ends with his death in his sleep. He falls in love (never is this stated in that way) and marries, fathers a child, and loses his little family in a short time. Somehow he manages to go on. He reconstructs a shelter, if not a life, on the very ashes of the enormous forest fire that took everything away from him.
The reader knows that someone with a weaker moral compass and cooler emotions would have moved on and started anew. A stray dog befriends him. Apparently no one else does. By the end of his working life, it occurs to him to acquire another dog on purpose. He dies entirely alone.
Is this book about the brutality of primitive life? Is it about the solitude of a sentient being surviving in surroundings with no room for any objectives but food, shelter, and sex? Is it another of the now traditional renderings of the American West, like Ivan Doig’s or Wallace Stegner’s? For me, it is all of those, but it seems to be most insistently a parable about the rarity and the nature of true innocence.
If you admire emotional impact, Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, and if you need a little nudge away toward a kind of moral absolutism in a suspenseful story, read this wonderful, spare, powerful tale.
— ©2012 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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