The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Night Train by Martin Amis
Stephen Bernstein

Martin Amis. Night Train. Harmony, 1997. 175 pp. $20.00.

Boasting a cast of characters that includes a Colonel Tom, Doctor No, Professor Faulkner, and Doctor Tulkinghorn, as well as a restaurant called Yeats’s, a street called Whitman, and a town called Destry, Martin Amis’s slim new novel is clearly concerned with the confluence of several different elite and popular cultural traditions. It is also a novel whose British writer seems to direct as a postcard to America, a bemused missive that ponders the endemic and frequently meaningless violence at the culture’s core. Narrated by female detective Mike Hoolihan, Night Train follows a circuitous route through the investigation of a violent act that hovers tantalizingly between murder and suicide. Unlike a precursor in the postmodern, metaphysical detective genre like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Amis’s version is humanly warmer and less obsessed with mathematical symmetry. Instead, he poses his narrative as a desultory study of its victim, Jennifer Rockwell. And Rockwell is worth this focus, at once an emblem of American middle-class success, a provocative double for the novel’s burly narrator, and an ennui-ridden descendant of London Fields’s memorable Nicola Six. As Hoolihan’s complex investigation of Jennifer’s death proceeds, television, the movies, and the more mysteriously general sense of meaninglessness in American culture are implicated as the fuel driving a powerful night train through the national psyche. The locomotive of the novel’s title is present enough throughout the narrative, but also recalls the rhythm and blues classic recorded by several different artists. The interpretive variation of these recordings is a metaphor for the shifting, not to say empty, possibility at the core of Hoolihan’s investigation. This fascinating and dazzlingly written novel does provide solutions to the various mysteries it poses, but those solutions are every bit as enigmatic and disturbing as the problems they solve. [Stephen Bernstein]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Night Train by Martin Amis Stephen Bernstein Martin Amis. Night Train. Harmony, 1997. 175 pp. $20.00. Boasting a cast of characters that includes a Colonel Tom, Doctor No, Professor Faulkner, and Doctor Tulkinghorn, as well as a restaurant called Yeats’s, a street called Whitman, and a town called Destry, Martin Amis’s slim new novel is clearly concerned with the confluence of several different elite and popular cultural traditions. It is also a novel whose British writer seems to direct as a postcard to America, a bemused missive that ponders the endemic and frequently meaningless violence at the culture’s core. Narrated by female detective Mike Hoolihan, Night Train follows a circuitous route through the investigation of a violent act that hovers tantalizingly between murder and suicide. Unlike a precursor in the postmodern, metaphysical detective genre like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Amis’s version is humanly warmer and less obsessed with mathematical symmetry. Instead, he poses his narrative as a desultory study of its victim, Jennifer Rockwell. And Rockwell is worth this focus, at once an emblem of American middle-class success, a provocative double for the novel’s burly narrator, and an ennui-ridden descendant of London Fields’s memorable Nicola Six. As Hoolihan’s complex investigation of Jennifer’s death proceeds, television, the movies, and the more mysteriously general sense of meaninglessness in American culture are implicated as the fuel driving a powerful night train through the national psyche. The locomotive of the novel’s title is present enough throughout the narrative, but also recalls the rhythm and blues classic recorded by several different artists. The interpretive variation of these recordings is a metaphor for the shifting, not to say empty, possibility at the core of Hoolihan’s investigation. This fascinating and dazzlingly written novel does provide solutions to the various mysteries it poses, but those solutions are every bit as enigmatic and disturbing as the problems they solve. [Stephen Bernstein]

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