From the Ridiculous to the Sublime:
The Early Reception of Night Train

© 1997 by James Diedrick; posted October 30, 1997

    With the help of the LEXIS-NEXIS database, I have surveyed more than a dozen recent reviews of Martin Amis’s new novel Night Train, published in the U.K. in October and scheduled for a February release in the U.S. (my own review of the novel will be appearing shortly on The Mining Company’s Authors Review of Books web page). Not surprisingly, given Amis’s controversial public persona and equally controversial prose style, the reviews are mixed. But the response that matters most in this first gathering–Adam Phillips’ penetrating analysis in the London Review of Books ("Cloud Cover," LRB, 16 October: 3-7)–simultaneously shames the glib reactions of the daily press, and takes the fullest measure of Amis’s achievement.

More on Phillips’ essay in a moment. First, the usual suspects:

    From the evidence of the first American responses, Amis may want to reconsider his recently announced plans to emigrate. "I wanted very much to like this book," John Updike announced in his September 21 review in the Sunday Times of London, "and the fact that I wound up hating it amounts to a painful personal failure." Updike questions Amis’s competence at the most basic level. "The trouble . . . with Night Train," writes Updike, "is the unmentionable way the plot proceeds. My trouble is with the solution of the mystery and the point of the book." This complaint strikes me as disingenuous on Updike’s part, since he must know that Amis is parodying, not parroting the hard-boiled American detective novel whose rhythms he has adopted. And sure enough, in the final paragraph of his review Updike reveals the real (and generational) source of his disapproval. Amis doesn’t provide the humanist pieties Updike looks for in his fiction:

Young people, I was told last summer in Italy, are talking no longer about the postmodern but the post-human. To keep up with the future, they are going in for mutilation and artificial body parts. Amis writes out of a sensibility uncomfortably on the edge of the post-human. His characters strikingly lack the soulful, willful warmth that he admires in Saul Bellow; they seem quick-moving automata, assembled of mostly disagreeable traits. His fiction lacks what the late Queenie Leavis called "positives." As a mystery, Night Train suffers from a lack of minor characters even momentarily sympathetic enough to serve as red herrings. We can believe, initially at least, in Hoolihan's wonderfully slangy way of talking and her bluesy love of police work; we can't believe in anything about Jennifer Rockwell but her supposedly beautiful and now-vacated body. She, and Night Train, become pure diagram, on a blackboard as flat as it is black.

Nothing like a little body piercing to get Updike’s grandfatherly hackles up. If he is genuinely concerned about intimations of the "post-human," perhaps he should begin by assailing the works of Samuel Beckett. Of course, his disdain may also have something to do with Amis’s comments on Updike’s Rabbit trilogy, which blend tart criticism with high regard ("John Updike: Rabbitland and Bechville," in The Moronic Inferno, pp. 155-59).

    The other American review–this one in an American newspaper (The Buffalo News), is dismissive in a less principled way. It also reveals the danger courted by any serious novelist who appropriates genre conventions for anti-generic purposes. "Night Train is English author Martin Amis’ attempt at a whodunit set in an American big city, very much like New York," writes Michael D. Langan in the October 12 edition of the News. "The plot is ragged, the conclusion inconclusive."

Whatever else it is, Night Train is emphatically not a "whodunit"; if anything, it is a "whydunit," a fact which only a few of the early reviewers seem to have grasped.

    On the other side of the pond, one favorite form of dismissal has been the personal attack disguised (only thinly) as a review. In this regard David Sexton of the London Evening Standard sets the bar as low as it can go. "Night Train is an all-American novel, fit company for Amis’s American agent, intimates and ivories," he sneers, managing to assail Amis’s fondness for American culture, his management of his career, his relationship with Isabel Fonseca, and his dental treatments in one shotgun sentence.

    Night Train has received three additional negative reviews in the British press: by Sean O’Brien in TLS, by Russell Celyn in the London Times, and by Theodore Dalrymple in the Sunday Telegraph. James Wood’s review in the Observer is mixed, as is Geoff Dyer’s in The Independent. Displaying his own penchant for mixed grammar, Dyer notes "there is much to astonish and admire here," but then goes on to weigh Amis's "matchless linguistic power" against what he calls "the relative banality of his thought."

    Taking the positive reviews in order of their increasing substance, David Flusfeder describes Night Train as "a short, atmospheric noir novel with good touches" in the British Esquire. "The pleasure...is not in its metaphysical dilemmas but in the polish of the delivery," writes Philip Hensher in The Mail on Sunday. For James Walton, in The Daily Telegraph, "a new fix of our man's prose...is always welcome, and his is a mind whose company is never dull." And the Manchester Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland suggests a link between the emotional landscape of Night Train and Tony’s Blair’s England. "Suddenly relationships, rather than ideas, matter most," writes Freedland. "Martin Amis's latest novel, Night Train, reads like a work of New Britain."

    In the midst of all these male voices, the response of Manchester Guardian Weekly reviewer Natasha Walter offers a welcome change of perspective. Writing in the September 28 issue, Walter suggests the surprises in store for the reader of the novel:

If you usually like Martin Amis's books, you probably won't like Night Train. At the age of 24, with the publication of The Rachel Papers, Amis already sounded jaded; by the time he was 35, with the publication of Money, his voice was so world-weary that nothing could come as any kind of shock to him or to his readers. He charted the descent of sex into pornography, of friendship into envy, of ambition into greed -- all with emotionless aplomb.

With Night Train, Antis has taken a rather different direction. This is not a strikingly clever book, and it isn't funny. It reads like the work of a much younger man than his other novels. Unlike his other works, it asks you not to keep your distance, but to come close and suffer with the narrator.

The narrator in question is Mike Hoolihan, a policewoman in a generic American town, who is working on an odd case: the suicide of a young woman called Jennifer Rockwell. Mike knew Jennifer before her death, and knew her as a young woman whose open smile, cool intelligence, social warmth and beauty marked her out as extraordinarily blessed. And so the discovery of Jennifer in her pretty apartment, naked, with her brains blown out, strikes Hoolihan not just as a shock, but as an endlessly troubling mystery.

Walter links this character pairing to earlier Amis novels, but notes a crucial difference:

What's more, the two women have a connection even after death. Here we have the usual Amis pairing of an ugly, unlucky protagonist set against a beautiful, lucky one; the same pairing that we see in Success or The Information. But here it leads to empathy, not enmity. As Hoolihan hunts through the false clues that Jennifer leaves her, she struggles to enter fully into her mind, and Jennifer's despair gradually becomes her own. It is impossible to overstate the difference that this current of ordinary sympathy makes to Amis's imaginative world. It makes a juddering contrast with the plot's nihilism, and that unresolved conflict between love and cynicism gives this book a haunting, unsettling quality that Amis has never achieved before.

This from a novelist whose masterpiece Money was excluded from the 1984 Booker shortlist because of its author’s supposed misogyny. Walter continues: "It is as though by taking on a woman's voice, he has found a franker, less ironic world than in his other novels...It is impossible to overstate the difference that this current of ordinary sympathy makes to Amis's imaginative world."

    With his review of Night Train in the 16 October issue of the London Review of Books, Adam Phillips joins a select group of British critics capable of judging Amis’s distinctive voice and vision. (The others are John Bayley, Graham Fuller, Victoria Glendinning, Ian Hamilton, M. John Harrison, Mick Imlah, Frank Kermode, John Lancaster, David Lodge, Adam Mars-Jones, and Karl Miller). "There are novelists who want to interest the reader in their characters, and novelists who want to interest us in themselves," Phillips writes. "One of the many remarkable things about Amis is that he’s never been quite sure which kind of writer he wants to be; and at his best–in Success, in Money, in Time’s Arrow–he has been able to be both. The moralist and the celebrity are awkward bedfellows; they have to be as artful as Amis can be to pull it off." Phillips’s "short list" of Amis’s major achievements is exactly right, and so is his summary explanation of their peculiar power.

    Phillips answers those who chide Amis for being too self-consciously literary, too intertextual, by noting that "the moralist in Amis has always insisted that not everything is literary. . . . The idea of the literary has always been tricky for Amis–something both loathed and desired as a safe house–largely because he is a very literary writer obsessed by everything that is anti-literary in the culture. . . . His way of showing us in his novels how supposedly unliterary it is out there has been to write about urban poverty, violence, the streets, people who don’t read literature. And Amis then makes all this very literary indeed; which usually means, in his novels, frighteningly funny."

Then Phillips zeroes in on Amis’s singular theme:

All Amis’s characters seem to live in their own tunnels–and he has an uncanny ability to evoke the eerie isolation and isolationism of their lives–with a narrator always trying to find an alternative to tunnel-vision. Self-consciousness, as a threat and a promise (the furtive logic, the demonic secrecy people live by), has been his great preoccupation, which makes suicide, especially the suicide of the nominally happy–the theme of Night Train–an obvious subject for him. If the ur-title of Amis’s work is Other People: A Mystery Story, the title of his least good novel, then we might have seen this one coming. Money, after all, for which Night Train is the darker sequel, was a "suicide note."

The narrator and protagonist of Night Train, Phillips writes, "is so glaringly, so brashly literary that Amis makes us wonder what he’s up to. Hoolihan is the writer of the book, a shrewd ‘reader’ of crime scenes, suicide notes and character; she solves crimes like a novelist writes a book . . . she ‘represents’ the female voice in Amis’s boyish fiction–and she is, curiously, one of the most haunting narrators in Amis’s work."

    What Amis is "up to," Phillips makes clear, is sufficiently complex that "Night Train asks to be read more than once." Part spoof of a detective novel, part metaphysical thriller about cause and effect, part "A Reply to My Critics," Night Train is more than anything else "about the terrifying mislogic of self-consciousness." In Night Train, Phillips writes, "the moral quest of the book is to find bearable forms of self-consciousness. Political correctness heightens self-consciousness, and assumes this to be a good thing. In Night Train political correctness is part of a larger problem, of self-awareness experienced as an obscure punishment. ‘I have no idea what I’m feeling,’ Hoolihan says toward the end of the book, but she experiences ‘random stabs of love and hate’, as though she is being murdered by her feelings. As though she is committing suicide whether she likes it or not."

    Martin Amis has always been a great ventriloquist, from the callow youth Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers, to the exhilaratingly appalling John Self in Money, to the bewildered child (a version of Louis Amis) in "What Happened to Me on My Holiday" (The New Yorker, 21 July 1997: 64-67), who adopts a language overloaded with hard consonants because his grief has created a "zdrange resizdanze" (strange resistance) to clarity.

    Mike Hoolihan has just added her voice to this memorable company, and at least two of her listeners can hear its rich resonances.

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