From: jonesy
Category: Amis
Date: 8/18/99
Time: 10:23:26 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.248.35
In Amis' interview with Elmore Leonard (link from Interviews page of MAW). Leonard asks Amis the following:
LEONARD: I wanted to ask you: I noticed in your new book, "Night Train, " which is first person, there are several third-person lines in it.
AMIS: Oh? You better point them out to me.
LEONARD: There's one in one of the first paragraphs.
AMIS: A third-person line?
LEONARD:: Uh-huh. She da-da-da-duh.
AMIS: (pause) Not that I recall. I'm sure I would have caught that. Anyway, we'll sort this out afterward.
LEONARD: I'm surprised. I thought you did it on purpose and it was OK.
AMIS: I better take another look at that and change it for the paperback perhaps.
This is what Leonard's talking about:
"What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. The worst case - for me, that is. When you're a police, "worst" is an elastic concept. You can't really get a fix on "worst." The boundaries are pushed out every other day. "Worst?" we'll ask. "there's no such thing as *worst*." But for Detective Mike Hoolihan this was the worst case" (Vintage, p.1).
Okay this definitely shifts from first to third person and it also shifts tense from present to past. Hoolihan explains the tense shifting a few pages later:
"These papers and transcripts were put together piece-meal over a period of four weeks. I apologize also for any inconsistencies in the tenses (hard to avoid, when writing about the recently dead)..." (p.5)
But she doesn't cover the shift in point of view. Now, as far as I can tell it doesn't happen again and it's been left in so, assuming Amis did check, it must be there for a reason. The only one I can think of was touched on by "Floyd Scarabelli" a while ago in reference to *The Information* and Simon and Garfunkel's *The Boxer*:
"Most of *The Boxer* is a first-person narrative. It's a confession of despair & self-pity spoken by a washed-up loser in the entertainment business … But the final part of *The Boxer* shifts into a third-person narrative … The narrational shift in *The Boxer* could possibly be interpreted as a psychological defense-mechanism on the part of the narrator. The boxer's defeat is too painful for the boxer to narrate in the first-person. So he objectifies himself with a third-person perspective in order to gain the necessary distance from himself
Mike could be distancing herself from her worst case by shifting POV except it never happens again. The only alternative I can think of is that it's the voice of Chandler (hard)boiling over into Amis' prose in acknowledgement of his influence on *Night Train*? I don't know, what do you lot think?
"Floyd" also reckons that *Night Train* is a "confession of Cluelessness But I'm not so sure, is Hoolihan clueless by the end of it or does she have it all figured out? I'd also like to know what you all think Jennifer's motives for suicide are. Surely it's not just "things don't get any better than this" is it?
And while I'm on the subject of paperback editions, in my Penguin edition of *Einstein's Monster's* pages 6 and 8 are printed backwards so that it's only possible to read them in a mirror! Now I'm assuming that this is a typo rather than a homage to Sterne, unless anyone knows better of course.