A Year in Reading: Lynn Steger Strong

At the end of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which I teach and re-read almost every year, a wolf-boy, (half boy half wolf or maybe only dressed up to appear this way) stands on stage, in front of a rapt and silent crowd–though minutes before, this same crowd was tittering, choosing whether or not to listen or to laugh–and screams. Screams, is maybe not quite right. It is a sort of wail, a primal scream. This is the last paragraph, one of my favorite ever paragraphs, in its entirety:

But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism.