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The Train Store - Night Train
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List Price: $12.95
Our Price: $0.45
Your Save: $ 12.50 ( 97% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780375701146
ISBN: 0375701141
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: 1999-01-26
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1999-01-26
Studio: Vintage
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not the Best
Comment: Maybe I need to read the book "Understanding Martin Amis" before I read another of his books. I did not find a thing of redeeming value in this narrative. My Dad was a cop, my husband is a cop, and I found that the "police" known as Mike was not the norm. Her approach to her job, her reactions, her thought processes . . . not a typical "police" at all, to use Mr. Amis' verbage. At this point I would say I am not likely to read another of his books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Was This an Experiment?
Comment: My first Amis book was "The Moronic Inferno," which fairly well roasted, if not scorched, a few American literary heroes, such as Mailer and Capote. Amis has published mainly fiction since then, and I have to say that "Night Train" was only my second Amis book, and my first novel.
A tiny bit of research based on street names will convince you that the setting is Seattle, Washington (plus, Mike's quick side trip to Vancouver to meet with Phyllida). Not mentioning the city the novel is set in is a curiosity akin to the opening line, "I am a police." Narrator Mike tells us that this is how all of her crime-fighting colleagues speak -- but we know that no one speaks that way (this is what made me think at first that this was set in a distant future where some changes in the language had made "I am a police" common usage).
As I read this, I had somewhat the same feeling as when I read Franz Kafka's "Amerika." Kafka had never been to America, and the America he described was clearly unrecognizable as America. In "Night Train," we find "Mike" Hoolahan speaking in Britishisms that I doubt a cop in Seattle, even one born in Vancouver, would use -- such as "shift" rather than "move," and so on.
"Mike," herself, strikes the reader as something of an oddity, as I'm sure Amis intended. The name, of course, emphasizes masculinity, but we're never quite sure of it. She never really convinces us of her femininity, either. Her sexual impulses are there, but they are truncated, and the reader knows she is not going to indulge them -- largely because she is such an artifact, a kind of put-together person, a male part here, a female part there, a "police" part here. Amis gets her to walk, but her stride is Frankensteinian and graceless.
Amis uses some interesting devices, especially with dialog, and I think they work. There are two major failings in the book, in my view. First, there is in the end no compelling reason for "Mike" to be female. It's fine that she is, and that creates certain psychological overtones, but ultimately her being female is not necessary to the story. Naming her "Mike," I think, has to be a clue that we do not have a either a man or a woman here, but a kind of simulacrum of the author (freely speaking British English, not American). Second, and perhaps fatally, the life and death of Jennifer is presented in such a perfunctory manner, and in the end she becomes little more than a symbol for the other characters' failings. We are apparently supposed to believe in her superiority and to be shamed by her suicide, which is presented as an act of world-weariness -- she is in despair because she is such a great intellect trapped in dank Seattle with friends, bosses, lovers, fathers, and acquaintances who just can't live up to her level. The realization of her superiority drives the hero(ine), "Mike," to the edge, as well.
Jennifer's portentous insight into the universe, and her consequent suicide (a rather odd act of hostility, insofar as it was elaborately disguised) is given to us as a sort of tag-on to the novel, rather than as an integral insight -- because it is not prepared for in the narrative. Jennifer is, at first, a nice, happy, carefree astrophysicist everyone loves and who loves everyone; and then we "learn" (but are not shown) that she was actually a neurotic snob with passive-aggressive personality dysfunction. Jennifer is not portrayed in retrospect as any more alive than the naked corpse sprawled on a chair at the beginning of the novel.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Difficult but Worthy
Comment: Our book club's novel for February was Night Train, by Martin Amis, which we'd selected from a series of proposed books that our members described as "quirky" or "out of the ordinary." We picked Night Train not only because of the author's reputation but also because of its brevity (175 pages).
Our discussion started with a fairly lengthy of what exactly genre fiction is. Night Train has all the elements of a traditional hard-boiled mystery: a hard-edged, bitter, cynical female cop who has been done dirt by the world, and who is barely holding on to her few remaining relationships. It also has what one would consider a traditional plot--the narrator's ("Mike" Hoolihan) mentor's daughter has committed suicide, but no one can accept this--and Mike is dispatched to find out what really happened. And, finally, the book is told in what could be considered the common sort of criminal/underworld/police patois that we have seen in noir fiction for decades (and which led some of us to wonder if people ever really talk(ed) like this, or if this is a hyperstylized made-up language that is "real" only in the world of fiction).
So why, then, does the book feel so surreal, and so non-standard? The book takes place in an unnamed American city with a reputation for being tough, but the language seems more British than American, beginning with the opening line "I am a police." Such an opening line almost sets up the expectation that you're going to be in a world you don't recognize or know much about--and that does indeed turn out to be the case. While the investigation does proceed on a more-or-less understandable, the book's final "reveal" is disturbing and completely unexpected (I can't say more without spoilers, but anyone who has read this book will know what I mean).
And it was in the ending that we had our most intense discussion, with the members pretty evenly divided. Some felt that reading the book had been an off-kilter experience for them throughout, as if they were caught in a strange alternate reality somewhere between fiction and real life. Others felt that the book and the ending were all the more satisfying because they are more "realistic" in terms of what life is really like--inconsistent characters, a series of events more than a "plotline" created and maintained by an author/narrator, and a conclusion that doesn't fit anyone's expectations of how a crime novel should end.
All in all, while we were divided on how much we "liked" the book, we all agreed that it was a singularly worthy read--a book, unlike so many mysteries, that can sustain long bouts of discussion. What I personally found so interesting about the discussion was that I was able to see all points of view. I understood why some people felt so passionately about the book's ground-breaking aspects, and I also understood why some people felt so frustrated (even robbed) by it. This is certainly an important book, and I think it's worth a read if you can handle intense discussions of suicide, alcoholism, and many other unpleasant things about life.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "That ticket costs you everything you have..."
Comment: 44-year-old female detective and recovering alcoholic, "Mike" Hoolihan, takes on the job of investigating the apparent suicide of Jennifer Rockwell, the only daughter of police brass, Colonel Tom. Tom is a powerful father figure for Mike: he saved her life by getting her off the booze. Now he wants her to explain what happened to his daughter. Jennifer had everything anybody wants: beauty, wit, health and a stimulating career. So the discovery in her orderly apartment of her naked body with three shots to the head strikes Hoolihan not just as a shock, but as an endlessly troubling mystery. As she attempts to solve it, Amis takes us down the well-worn paths of the traditional detective story: the crime scene, the autopsy, the interviews with Jennifer's doctor, lover and colleagues, mostly set in offices, bars and smoky police cells. The resolution is original while still remaining reasonably faithful to classic crime conventions. As Borges once observed, the American detective story is generally a disappointment precisely because its solutions don't satisfy the curiosity the plot has stirred. But Amis, to my mind, nails it. The ending is incredibly bleak and quite unexpected, though some readers will undoubtedly find it ambiguous... So much of the criticism of this startling little novel misses the mark by holding it to a standard it doesn't attempt to meet. The one thing we can be sure Amis is not doing here is attempting a conventional noirish crime novel. Rather, he borrows the conventions of one genre and uses them for something else: in this case, he takes the "detective story" as the narrative architecture for an existential drama, much like Paul Auster did in "The New York Trilogy". As "a police", Mike needs to be interested in the what and the how, and less in the why. But as Amis shows, the why is everything. The why is our central dilemma. I read "Night Train" in one sitting and enjoyed it immensely. I suspect the hatred it inspires has more to do with the average crime buff's disappointed expectations and/or the corrosive and now-automatic distaste many critics have for Martin Amis, and less to do with the book itself. It's good. They don't call him Smarty Anus for nothing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: not the greatest thing
Comment: Well when i got this book i thought that there was going to be more action in it. But it is just a story about a girl who did suicide (i am not done with it yet). This book also has to many swears in it, no one talks like that, only teens do (that are immature). I can't wait to be done with this book.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case--this case--has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop--now top brass--takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down." Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look. Not since his celebrated novel Money has Amis turned his focus on America to such remarkable effect. Fusing brilliant wordplay with all the elements of a classic whodunit, Amis exposes a world where surfaces are suspect (no matter how perfect), where paranoia is justified (no matter how pervasive), and where power and pride are brought low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.
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