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Jennifer's act was neither the product of nihilistic passion nor human curiosity. A gratuitous suicide chooses non-existence without having the slightest interest in existence. Just a decision to leave, to move from light to darkness, to turn away from this world and all its passions. Apart from the gunshots themselves there was nothing fulminant about this girl's end. It was nothing but ice. Jennifer was no "angel of light." It had all along been her opposite, Mike, who was capable of love, of generosity, of appreciating beauty--in people, in skies, on lawns, in apartment rooms, even in death scenes, "as delicate as orchids." This is a twist. The radiance is all Mike's. Jennifer had seemed to be the incarnation of everything Mike, without envy, had longed to be: young, beautiful, talented, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the beloved of Trader Faulkner. One moment before her death Jennifer was still in full possession of all the advantages Mike would always be denied--denied by nature, by fortune, by providence. Not in a thousand years could you get Mike to agree that she is the radiant sun to Jennifer's black hole. Mike, whose share of light has been very small to begin with, would rather give up altogether. It has become too painful for Mike to keep on walking, crawling, twelve-stepping, "sloping"--to use the Amis verb of choice in this novel. Detective Mike Hoolihan's job required her to think deeply about the reasons why suicides do themselves in. It was Mike's business to find out what makes a person reach the end of the line, the point of no return, the personal end-zone. To amuse herself Mike had taken note of the fact that every "stressor and precipitant" she struck from Jennifer's list would have appeared on a parallel list of her own. Mike fits the profile of a suicide to the letter: her "significant other" is a loser, her career is high risk--she "works around death"-- she is approaching retirement, she has no money, her looks (if she ever had any) are gone, her health is poor, she is an alcoholic, she has a "deep secret" (childhood trauma). The mystery is further compounded. It is strange that she should have survived so long, and it is yet stranger that she proves to be a genuine heroine. Jennifer, as Amis persuades us, may have come from the future, but Mike is that rare creature, still to be found among us here and now, who has a singularly gifted heart and is able to endure the worst horrors. From what source she manages to fill and refill that heart we aren't told. But characters like Mike are proof in themselves that there is such a source. And so we return finally, to our assertion that Jennifer's death drags Mike down in its undertow. After the toxicologist Paulie No confirmed Mike's suspicions (thereby entitling her to call Jennifer's case "a wrap"), he had offered her a drink in the Decoy Room at the Mallard Hotel. Mike chose seltzer, relishing, she told us, "The moment of deferral." Now that sweet moment has expired. Untangling the knot and "reducing it to a mess of loose ends" has proved as dangerous as Mike had anticipated: "This way I don't win. This way, I don't prevail." Having lost, she still intends to protect Colonel Tom from the truth by phoning him to say that the case "is down," that it has been satisfactorily solved, that it makes sense. This is the reason for the deferral. The call made, her obligations met, there is nothing to keep her from rushing down the stairs, in the book's final paragraph, and "heading off to the Battery and it long string of dives." The Battery has been mentioned earlier. The Mallard, the best hotel in town, was where you went to satisfy your weakness for a twenty dollar cocktail, for an elegant drink or two. But if what you were looking for was a "two day climb" you headed directly for the Battery and it "long string of dives." Mike is not likely to last for two days. Perhaps not even one. We've known this about her all along: "Mix me with alcohol and the result would be fulminant hepatic failure." Fulminant is precisely the word. But don't most suicides, as Mike herself tells us, leave notes? Jennifer's note concluded with an entire page of: "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry . . ." In the book's opening pages Mike foreshadows this, planting her own clue: "And I guess I apologize for the outcome," she says. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry." A reverse echo we're not likely to pick up in the first reading. Night Train itself may be our Mike's suicide note. Unless of course one of the many people passionately devoted to her--the live-in lover who comes panting up the stairs in the book's last paragraph, or Colonel Tom, disturbed by Mike's voice on the phone--intervenes, and sees to her revival and recovery. Amis leaves this possibility open, and so will I.
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