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The little Night Train that couldn't >> Has Martin Amis lost it? by JULIET WATERS
But, after a few chapters of Martin Amis's attempt at capturing noir America in this pseudo-detective novel, written from a female point of view, I was the one repeating something over and over again for no reason. The words: "C'mon... try," as though I was reading a storybook for adults called The Little Night Train That Could. Let's start with the opening paragraph: "I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement--or an unusual construction. But it's a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also." Right. And I am a Martin Amis, also. Martin Amis trying to write like a butch detective from a mythical, unnamed American city. A place where a hardened homicide detective would call herself "a police" instead of "a detective," and then throw in a word like "parlance." And a place where the police sound more half-baked than hard-boiled. Like when Detective Sergeant Henrik Overmars praises a brilliant report Mike writes and tries to shame her colleagues: "Compared to what you guys give me. This is fucking oratory. It's goddam Cicero versus Robespierre." I don't mean to underestimate the intelligence of your average North American cop by assuming that most of them don't have the classical education to be shamed by aspersions on their rhetorical sophistication. But if anything, it's Amis who underestimates their intelligence. For instance, when an extraordinarily gorgeous, happy, loving and brilliant scientist named Jennifer Rockwell who appears to have committed suicide by shooting herself in the head three times, only her ex-cop father suspects it might be murder. And when Mike asks for the federal stats on triple-header suicides, her colleague Detective Silvera tells her there have been seven in the last 20 years, and five of them women. Then he claims: "It's like we say. Men kill other people. It's a guy thing. Women kill themselves. Suicide's a babe thing, Mike." But later Mike does some reading on suicide and discovers that it's rarely "a babe thing." It's usually a guy thing. Attempted suicide is a babe thing. All right. Let's accept that these aren't facts that two homicide veterans would have learned on the job. I could hack this if Night Train were a parody. But this novel takes itself way too seriously to be parody. As it should. It's supposed to be about a painful, mysterious suicide. Yet by the time Amis has stuffed his last red herring into Night Train, I don't much care if, or why, Jennifer Rockwell killed herself. Because she's so perfect, she has all the character of a headless talking Barbie doll. If she had a string we could pull, she might tell us why she committed suicide. Maybe she'd say, "Math was great, but staring into the existential void was a drag." Mike Hoolihan has character, but remember she's also Martin Amis. She can be perceptive and funny. But this is a rare occurrence, like babes who shoot themselves in the head three times. Some writers have been claiming recently that maybe Amis has lost it. But I wouldn't go that far. It occurred to me after a while that the real problem may be that he's overachieving. Maybe he just needs to chill out for a while, go back to trying to be himself, write about what he knows, and stop trying to be so goddamn serious. Because to paraphrase Detective Sergeant Henrik Overmars, compared to what Amis has given us in the past, "this is fucking oratory." Night Train by Martin Amis, Random House, hc, 149pp, $26.95
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I've always believed Martin Amis was a brilliant satirist. Enough of a satirist that I could tolerate his annoying habit of repeating things three times for no reason, and his minor female characters who were always too perfect to be real. So I had high expectations for Night Train.