Robert Grainier was a loner who spent much of his life working on the railroads built across the American Northwest during the early twentieth century.

Denis Johnson's novel, "Tran Dream," follows Robert's life. His earliest memory is of traveling on a train to meet his adopted parents. He has no memory or knowledge of his birth parents or even when or where he was born. Most of his life revolves around the railroad - building the tracks or riding the trains. Robert is forever haunted by the memory of the day he helped co-workers try to lynch a Chinese worker. Robert never learned what alleged crime the immigrant committed, but he joined in the attack before the man escaped. Robert meets and marries his wife, Gladys, who bears him a daughter, Kate. While their husband is away working, Gladys and Kate perish in a forest fire. Their bodies are never recovered, and it takes him many months to accept their deaths.

This novella lacks plot twists and an overarching story, other than the life of an ordinary man living a mostly isolated life. It is an episodic novel without a coming-of-age story or a moral. It is the tale of a man navigating the changes of the twentieth century and the struggles of his own life. But Johnson writes simple, elegant prose, and the author develops his main character into a sympathetic outsider.