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Night Train ()


Granta Best British Novelists (1983)

    Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won't get there so quick, not by
    natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have.
        -Night Train

It is, perhaps, a little unfair to judge an author by a book which is generally recognized to be a departure from his general oeuvre.  However, from what I've read about him, Martin Amis is supposed to be a big fan of American Literature, of crime and noir fiction, and of Elmore Leonard in particular.  So it seems reasonable to at least assess this one novel according to the standards of the genre it is paying homage to, and it simply does not measure up.

Mike Hoolihan, the narrator, is a police detective in an unnamed second tier American city.  In what is apparently supposed to be a novel twist, mike is a she, a rather large she--5' 10", 180 pounds--but a she nonetheless.  She is called upon to investigate the apparent suicide of Jennifer Rockwell, a beautiful young astrophysicist, who, as the saying goes, "had it all."  The case is of particular importance because the victim was the daughter of Colonel Tom Rockwell, Mike's superior on the police force and something of a mentor to her.  It is an especially vexing case because Jennifer seems to have shot herself three times.

Now, I suppose there are no hard and fast rules to these things, but you'd think that if an author was trying to pay his respects to the classic hard boiled mystery the first thing he''d want to do is capture the voice, that tough talking, pared down, patter that distinguishes folks like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and their legions of imitators.  Amis gets off to a shaky start from page one when he has Mike introduce herself as follows : "I am a police."  Heck, I don't know if there's any variant of English in which that construction is grammatically correct, but I do know that no cop in America would introduce himself (herself) that way.  And it's downhill from there as Mike spends the rest of the book obsessing over the meaning of suicide and questions of physics and other blather which appears to be intended to add intellectual heft to the book.   But, you can't help feeling that he's chickened out in doing so.  It's sort of offensive that he feels compelled to slather on this pseudo-highbrow bunk.  If Amis doesn't perceive the deeper meanings and concerns that lie within the form he's imitating, perhaps he's not worthy to make the attempt.

There's also a rather profoundly shallow subtext to his speculation on suicide.  The fundamental mystery here is why a beautiful, intelligent, successful young woman would kill herself.  Well, I'm middle-aged, fat, hairy and unsuccessful, would that make my suicide somehow more explicable ?  Are beautiful people happier than the rest of us ?  Do they have more reason to live ?

In the end, I really just didn't care why Jennifer hopped the Night Train and was unmoved by the prospect that Mike might climb aboard too.  I just wanted the book to reach its final destination so I could get off.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (D)


Websites:

Martin Amis Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Martin Amis
    -Martin Amis Web
    -PODCAST: TheMartin Chronicles: Martin Amis one book at a time (Dan Kois)
    -
   
-OBIT: British Author Martin Amis Dies at 73: He is best known for novels ‘Money: A Suicide Note,’ ‘London Fields’ and ‘The Information’ (Ginger Adams Otis, May 20, 2023, Wall Street Journal)
    -OBIT: Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73 (Dwight Garner, May. 20th, 2023, NY Times)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis’s Comic Music: The great British novelist, who has died at seventy-three, had a true literary vitality that was high-spirited and farcical. (James Wood, 5/20/23, The New Yorker)
    -OBIT: Martin Amis, Influential Writer, Dead at 73: His stylish fiction and nonfiction addressed grand moral questions (TOBIAS CARROLL, 5/20/23, Inside Hook)
    -OBIT: Martin Amis’s death is the end of a great British comic tradition: The novelist leaves a distinctive and distinguished legacy (Alexander Larman, May 20, 2023, Spectator)
    -OBIT: Martin Amis, a second-generation literary lion (Barney SPENDER, May 20, 2023, AFP)
    -OBIT: Martin Amis, British writer who cast caustic eye on society, dies at 73 (Brian Murphy, May 20, 2023, Washington Post)
    -OBIT: Martin Amis obituary: Writer whose acrobatic wit defied gravity and solemnity and who epitomised literary fame in an age of glitz and hype (Boyd Tonkin, 5/20/23, The Guardian)
    -PODCAST: Remembering Martin Amis (NY Times Book Review, 5/26/23)
    -TRIBUTE: The Sardonic Inferno: At its best, Amis’s fiction broke open the locked door behind which our culture tries to keep its skeletons hidden. (Matt Hanson, 2 Jun 2023, Quillette)
    -TRIBUTE: “The British Male!”: On Martin Amis (The Paris Review, May 26, 2023)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis, Cinephile (ABHRAJYOTI CHAKRABORTY, 6/07/23, Hazlitt)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis, R.I.P. (RICHARD BROOKHISER, May 20, 2023, National Review)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis’s confrontational genius: Not many novelists, even the very greatest, have a career that lasts fifty years (Philip Hensher, May 22, 2023, Spectator)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis knew the horror of words: Debased language is the tool of the dictator (DAVID PATRIKARAKOS, 5/21/23, unHerd)
    -TRIBUTE: Losing a Brother in Martin Amis (Ian McEwen, May. 22nd, 2023, The New Yorker)
    -TRIBUTE: The liberal complacency of Martin Amis: His exquisite style hid a squalid sense of morality (TERRY EAGLETON, 5/22/23, UnHerd)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis’s Comic Music: The great British novelist, who has died at seventy-three, had a true literary vitality that was high-spirited and farcical. (James Wood, 5/22/23, The New Yorker)
    -TRIBUTE:William Boyd on his friend Martin Amis: ‘He was ferociously intelligent – and very funny’(William Boyd, 22 May 2023, The Guardian)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis was Mick Jagger in literary form, I was besotted with his electrifying prose (Geoff Dyer, %/21/23, The Guardian)
    -TRUBUTE: ‘Damn, that fool can write’: how Martin Amis made everyone up their game (Lisa Allardice, 22 May 2023, The Guardian)
    -TRIBUTE: Rediscovering Martin Amis: He made reading, and writing, fun (Ben Sixsmith, 21 May, 2023, The Critic)
    -ESSAY: The Winter of The Information: Revisiting the four-month scandal that made Martin Amis the center of the literary world. (DAN KOIS, MAY 20, 2023, Slate)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis, 1949–2023: A craftsman whose abhorrence of cliché helped create greatness. (BILL RYAN, MAY 22, 2023, The Bulwark)
    -TRIBUTE: The voice of a generation: Martin Amis, 1949-2023 (David Herman, 5/23/23, The Article)
    -TRIBUTE: The dark genius of Martin Amis: His brilliant satires of 1980s Britain reflected a unique literary talent. (James Heartfield, 5/23/23, spiked)
    -TRIBUTE: Fizz and Moxie Martin Amis was both a master and a progenitor of the English idiom. (Jonathan Clarke, May 24 2023, City Journal)
    -TRIBUTE: MARTIN AMIS, R.I.P.: On the late British novelist. (Matthew Walther, May 23, 2023, The Lamp)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis Against Mediocrity: Cliches are dangerous because they turn into ideology. (Emina Melonic, Splice Today)
    -TRIBUTE: Good Night, Sweet Prince: Our critic assesses the achievement of Martin Amis, Britain’s most famous literary son. (A. O. Scott, 5/22/23, NY Times)
    -TRIBUTE: Martin Amis and Apocalypse: The late author had long warned of the danger of nuclear catastrophe. (James W. Carden, May 27, 2023, American Conservative)
    -TRIBUTE: Other Writers Seem Asleep by Comparison (Jennifer Egan, May. 26th, 2023, The Atlantic)
   
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-
   
-REVIEW: of The Dean's December by Saul Bellow (Martin Amis, LRB)
    -WIKIPEDIA: Koba the Dread
    -BOOK SITE: Koba the Dread (Penguin Random House)
    -EXCERPT: First Chapter of Koba the Dread
    -ESSAY: The palace of the end: The first war of the Age of Proliferation will not be an oil-grab so much as an expression of pure power (Martin Amis, March 4, 2003, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: Lightness at Midnight: Stalinism without irony (CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, SEPTEMBER 2002, The Atlantic)
Writing toward the very end of his life, a life that had included surprising Stalin himself by a refusal to confess, and the authorship of a novel—The Case of Comrade Tulayev—that somewhat anticipated Darkness at Noon, Victor Serge could still speak a bit defensively about the bankruptcy of socialism in the "midnight of the century" represented by the Hitler-Stalin pact. But he added,

Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? ... If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us.

In the best sections of this book Amis makes the extraordinary demand that, in effect, the human species should give up on teleology and on all forms of "experiment" on fellow creatures. He is being much more revolutionary here than perhaps he appreciates.

    -INTERVIEW: Martin Amis in Conversation with Olga Slavnikova (The New Yorker, 6/13/12)
    -INTERVIEW: Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151 (Interviewed by Francesca Riviere, ISSUE 146, SPRING 1998, Paris Review)
    -PROFILE: A VERY ENGLISH STORY (Jonathan Wilson, February 26, 1995, The New Yorker)
    -TRUBUTE: Martin Amis, by a woman who loved him (By Alys Denby, 5/24/23, CapX)
    -BOOK LIST: Six Essential Books by Martin Amis (Tobias Carroll, 5/21/23, Inside Hook)
    -ESSAY: Why We Should Read Martin Amis (Riley Moore, 1/09/21, Quillette)
    -TRIBUTE: The Singular Robert Conquest (JAY NORDLINGER, September 10, 2015, National Review)
    -
   
-ESSAY: Son of Saul: Martin Amis and Saul Bellow (Jeffrey Meyers, 10/15/23, The Article)
    -PROFILE: Is Saul Bellow Martin Amis’s true father?: Reviews of Martin Amis’s new book prove that the best questions are the ones that no one asks (David Herman, 10/02/20, the Critic)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread by Martin Amis (Paul Berman, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Anne Applebaum, Slate)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Neal Ascherson, The Guardian)
Amis has loved two men who have found reasons not to dismiss what happened after October 1917 in Russia as an inexcusable moral atrocity. These two are his late father, Kingsley Amis, and Christopher Hitchens. Kingsley Amis, before his spectacular conversion to the right, was a member of the Communist party from 1941 to 1956. Hitchens was never a Stalinist, but he stayed loyal to an intellectual Trotskyist view of the Bolshevik revolution, which honoured Lenin and blamed Stalin for deforming the revolution into a state-capitalist dictatorship. Amis is asking how could they have. But of course he is also asking how could I have, how can I continue to love them?

    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Publishers Weekly)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Complete Review)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Jason Cowley, The Observer)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Charles Taylor, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of Koba the Dread (Paul Daley, The Age)
    -REVIEW: of House of Meetings by Martin Amis (Joan Acocella, the New Yorker)
    -REVIEW: of House of Meetings (Thomas Mallon, Washinhgton Post)
    -REVIEW: of THE SECOND PLANE: September 11: Terror and Boredom By Martin Amis (Warren Bass, Washington Post)
    -REVIEW: of Inside Story by Martin Amis (New Statesman)
    -REVIEW: of Inside Story (Ronald K. Fried, Daily Beast)
    -REVIEW: of Inside Story (Douglas Murray, UnHerd)
    -REVIEW: of Inside Story (declan Fry, Australian Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of The Pregnant Widow (Jenny Turner, LRB)
    -REVIEW: of Martin Amis: the Biography by Richard Bradford (Brian Finney, LA Review of Books)
    -
   
-REVIEW: of Night Train by Martin Amis (Adam Phillips, LRB)
    -ESSAY: The End-Of-History Smart Set: From '60s radicals to pro-war liberals, the West's last literary clique now seems a relic of the 20th century. That isn't such a bad thing. (Matt Purple, 5/28/21, American Conservative)

Book-related and General Links:
    -Featured Author: Martin Amis (NY Times)
    -Martin Amis Web
    -EXCERPT : First Chapter of Night Train
    -EXCERPT : First Chapter of Heavy Water
    -ESSAY :  London Literary Life : Let Me In, Let Me In! (Martin Amis, April 5, 1981, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of Underworld by Don DeLillo (Martin Amis, NY Times Book Review)
    -INTERVIEW : with Martin Amis (Laura Miller, Salon)
    -INTERVIEW : with Martin Amis (Alan Rusbridger, May 8, 2000, The Guardian)
    -INTERVIEW : 'You lying hippies' : Martin Amis tells Andrew Pulver about novels, movie-making and the 1970s  (January 23, 2001, The Guardian)
    -INTERVIEW : Martin Amis (Linda Richards, January Magazine)
    -INTERVIEW : NO CLOUT IN THE HOME : An Interview With Martin Amis (Monica Drake, The Stranger)
    -INTERVIEW : Fathers and sons : Martin Amis discusses art, death and family relationships with his mentor and kindred spirit, Saul Bellow (Electronic Telegraph)
    -INTERVIEW : Why Amis can't escape : Martin Amis tells 'Prison Writing' magazine about the words he stole from Dylan and of his thwarted plans to flee Britain... (Electronic Telegraph)
    -INTERVIEW : No More Illusions : Martin Amis is Getting Old and Wants to Talk About It (Alexander Laurence and Kathleen McGee , The Write Stuff)
    -INTERVIEW : An Interview with Martin Amis (Will Self, Mississippi Review)
    -INTERVIEW : Punk no more : Can the angry young writer who shocked readers with Money and Dead Babies really be 50 already? The son of Kingsley Amis talks  to The Globe about life, love and the allure of America. (DOUG SAUNDERS, May 6, 2000, The Globe and Mail)
    -INTERVIEW : What an Experience  with Martin Amis Pt. 3 (Danielle Egan, Terminal City)
    -INTERVIEW : with Martin Amis (Commonweath Club)
    -CHAT TRANSRIPT: (HotWired, 16 May 1995)
    -PROFILE : Martin Amis: Down London's Mean Streets : There is more to Martin Amis, Mira Stout finds in this profile, than the bad-boy reputation he has developed in the London press. She also interviews Amis's father, Kingsley. One of England's original ''angry young men,'' and now a Thatcherite, Kingsley thinks that in many ways Martin is a similar kind of writer. (Mira Stout, February 4, 1990, NY Times)
    -PROFILE : Success. Money. Happy? : New family, new novel, and a victory at tennis. No wonder Martin Amis is smiling (Tim Adams, October 12, 1997, The Observer )
    -PROFILE : Daddy dearest : The father's letters reveal a curmudgeonly love for this erudite son. So do the son's new memoirs show a mellowing of the tough man of letters? (Vanessa Thorpe, April 16, 2000, The Observer)
    -PROFILE : Martin Amis braves America (Adam Woog, January 29, 1998, The Seattle Times)
    -PROFILE : Famous Amis, up close and personal  (Ellen Emry Heltzel, The Oregonian, February 15, 1999)
    -ESSAY : The Gulag Argumento: Martin Amis swings at Stalin and hits his own best friend instead. (Anne Applebaum, August 13, 2002, Slate)
    -Martin Amis - Author Page  (Guardian Unlimited)
    -THE INFOGRAPHY :   Amis, Martin (1949- )
    -Martin Amis (August 25, 1949 - ) (Bradley C. Shoop)
    -ARTICLE : New Novelist Is Called a Plagiarist : Martin Amis accuses Jacob Epstein of plagiarism in Epstein's first novel "Wild Oats." Amis cites fifty examples of nearly identical wording in "Wild Oats" and Amis's 1972 novel "The Rachel Papers." (SUSAN HELLER ANDERSON, The New York Times,  October 21, 1980)
    -ARTICLE : Writer Apologizes for Plagiarism : Jacob Epstein apologizes for the plagiarism. He explains that he had kept notebooks of passages he admired from "The Rachel Papers" and other books. After reworking the material, he lost his original notebooks and was unable to reconstruct what he had borrowed and what he had invented. (SUSAN HELLER ANDERSON, The New York Times, October 28, 1980)
    -ARTICLE : Girl finds father is Martin Amis (Elizabeth Grice, June 21 1996, Electronic Telegraph)
    -ARTICLE : Martin Amis's Big Deal Leaves Literati Fuming : A deal paying Martin Amis over $700,000 for his novel ''The Information'' left a lot of hard feelings in London's literary circles, where commercial success is viewed warily by serious novelists.  (Sarah Lyall, January 31, 1995, NY Times)
    -ESSAY : Is Martin Amis worth it? : As the 'Mick Jagger of literature' goes back to his old publisher for a cool £1 million, George Thwaites looks at how his latest novel has been selling (Electronic Telegraph)
    -ESSAY : The Sisyphean treadmill of anguish : Obsession with death or prescient vision? Martin Cropper on parallels, constants and appalling coincidences in Martin Amis's work (Electronic Telegraph, 31 August 1996 )
    -ESSAY : MARTIN AMIS: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov (Victoria N. Alexander, The Antioch Review Fall 1994)
    -ESSAY : Blame it on Amis, Barnes and McEwan : British novels no longer bring us "news" of our times. (Jason Cowley, New Statesman)
    -ESSAY : Losing a grip on reality (Julie Burchill, August 4, 2001, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY : Notebook : The novel is dead again (Ian Jack,  May 30, 2001, Granta)
    -ESSAY : NARRATIVE AND NARRATED HOMICIDE IN MARTIN AMIS'S OTHER PEOPLE AND LONDON FIELDS (Brian Finney)
    -ESSAY : WHAT'S AMIS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION? MARTIN AMIS'S MONEY AND TIME'S ARROW (Brian Finney )
    -ESSAY : "Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis's Time's Arrow"  (Richard Menke)
    -ESSAY : History and Memory in Slaughterhouse Five and Time's Arrow (V. Archer)
    -ESSAY : Time in the Body (Melissa Miles, : Vitanza, E5352, Deleuze & Guattari and Rhetorical Theory)
    -ESSAY : And so, to begin at the end ... (JANE SULLIVAN, 21 May 2001, The Age)
    -ESSAY : From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: The Early Reception of Night Train (James Diedrick)
    -ESSAY : Will They Survive ? : Literary Reputations : The Amises (DJ Taylor, New Statesman)
    -SLATE BOOK CLUB : This week, a discussion of Experience:  A Memoir, by Martin Amis (Andrew O'Hagan & Inigo Thomas, Slate)
    -ARCHIVES : Salon.com Directory | Martin Amis
    -ARCHIVES : "Martin Amis" (Slate)
    -REVIEW : of Time's Arrow (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
    -ANNOTATED REVIEW : Amis, Martin Time's Arrow (Jan Marta, Medical Humanities)
    -REVIEW : of TIME'S ARROW by Martin Amis (Evelyn C. Leeper)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (PATRICK MCGRATH, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (complete review)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Frank Kermode, Atlantic Monthly)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Allen Barra, Salon)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (John Updike, Times of London)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Luc Sante, Slate)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Walter Kirn, New York)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Art Taylor, Spectator Online)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Andrew Taylor, Tangled Web)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Jonathan Foreman, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (James William Brown, Book Page)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Allen Barra, City Pages)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Adam Woog, Seattle Times)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train by Martin Amis (Natasha Walter, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (YVONNE CRITTENDEN --Toronto Sun)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (HOLLIE SHAW -- CP)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (GARNET FRASER -- Edmonton Sun)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (CHRIS NELSON -- Calgary Sun)
    -REVIEW : of Night Train (Rahul Gupta, Pulse)
    -REVIEW : of The Rachel Papers (Grace Gleuck, May 26, 1974, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of Einstein's Monsters (Carolyn See, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of London Fields by Martin Amis (Christina Koning, September 21, 1989, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW : of London Fields (Michelle Rainer, The Peak, Simon Fraser University's Student Newspaper)
    -REVIEW : of The Information  by Martin Amis (E. Scott Slater, Boston Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Heavy Water (complete review)
    -REVIEW : of Heavy Water and Other Stories by Martin Amis (Laura Miller, Salon)
    -REVIEW : of Heavy Water (Nathaniel Rich, Yale Review of Books)
    -REVIEW : of Heavy Water & Other Stories by Martin Amis (Brooke Allen, New Criterion)
    -REVIEW : of Experience by Martin Amis (James Wood, May 20, 2000, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW : of Experience ( Andrew Roe, Salon)
    -REVIEW : of Experience : Working-class monster : Relatives say Martin Amis' new memoir exploits his murdered cousin, and they're right -- but not in the way they think. (Graham Joyce, Salon)
    -REVIEW : of Experience: A Memoir  by Martin Amis (Katherine Catmull, Austin Chronicle)
    -REVIEW : of Experience (Jeanie MacFarlane, The Hamilton Spectator)
    -REVIEW : of Experience (ELIZABETH GRICE, The Age)
    -REVIEW : of Experience by Martin Amis (Joy Press, Village Voice)
    -REVIEW : of The Letters of Kingsley Amis and  'Experience' by Martin Amis  (Christopher Hitchens, This is London)
    -REVIEW : of  The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis (Frank Kermode, London Review of Books)
    -REVIEW : of The War Against Cliche : Essays and Reviews 1971-2000  by Martin  Amis (Geoff Dyer, Guardian Unlimited)
    -REVIEW : of The War Against Cliche : Essays and Reviews 1971-2000  by Martin  Amis (Jason Cowley, The Observer)
    -REVIEW : of THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ by Martin Amis (January Magazine)
    -REVIEW : of The Information by Martin Amis (Edwin Frank, Boston Review)
    -BOOK LIST : Count on it :  The author of "The Girl in the Flammable Skirt" picks five great books that play with numbers. : Time's Arrow by Martin Amis (Aimee Bender, Salon)