Jumping the tracks
All aboard for despair, angst, nausea and points south.
by Timothy Dugdale--The
Metro Times (Detroit)
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5/27/98
Of all the kinds of celebrity, one would think
literary fame to be the best. After all, the writer can build a stack of books
between himself and his public.
Not so for Martin Amis. Born into the spotlight of his
father, Kingsley Amis, little Marty was destined for the big time. Over a decade
and a half, he gained a reputation as the bad boy of British letters, chronicler
of desperate living in the young middling classes of the Iron Lady's England.
Then, two years ago, all hell broke loose. A midlife
crisis swooped down, and Amis opted for a new wife, new agent and expensive new
teeth. The British press went wild, and Amis fled to the United States, where
two of his idols, Saul Bellow and John Updike, ply their trade. With that in
mind, one is tempted to suggest that his latest work, Night
Train, is the result of licking his wounds and
rethinking his style.
Indeed, the most striking aspect of this book is its
form. It's a novella, pared of digression and philosophical elaboration. The
main voice belongs to Mike Hollahan, a middle-aged, butch, female cop who
specializes in the articulate inarticulation one might expect from someone tired
of doing the only thing she knows how to do. She likes to drink; she likes to
fuck -- not so much out of pleasure as to dull the pain.
And in Night Train,
the pain arrives in one big package. Astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell commits
suicide, and Mike sets out, as a favor to her daddy, a retired police
commissioner, to find a reason powerful enough to make a young woman fellate a
pistol.
The trigger pulled, the survivors are left to deal
with grief, unresolvable in Christian terms, while the reader is invited to
grapple with existential questions of mortality. "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."
Uh-oh, you say -- Amis doing a hard-boiled cop dolled
up with millennium-tinged existential angst. Raymond Chandler meets Marshall
Applewhite at Camus' beachhouse. No thanks.
Really, he can't help himself. Amis is the product of
'70s England when Oxbridge ponces such as himself got hopped up about nuclear
weapons and the horror of annihilation. On this side of the ocean, Don Delillo
bored us to tears on the topic. Perhaps sensing that he was beating a dead
horse, Amis moved his cast of perpetually flawed characters onto a new crisis in
a new locale.
And why not metaphysics in Chicago? The unnamed
streets and sounds in Night Train
clearly have vibrations of the Windy City, Bellow territory, in particular The
Dean's December, the obvious touchstone for
this work.
Alas, Amis' flimsy WASP morality is no match for
Bellow's wizened rabbinical sagacity. One suspects Bellow would yawn at the
dilemma that intrigues Amis. Jennifer Rockwell is not praised for her ability to
"solve the absurd," as Camus put it, of modern life. Rather, Amis
adopts Chesterton's posture that suicide is worse than murder, for everyone is
killed.
Even if Jennifer found modern existence wanting, Amis
appears to be saying, she had an obligation to carry on, milling in the station
of quiet desperation like the rest of us until the train runs on schedule.
Timothy Dugdale writes about film and culture
for the Metro Times.
