The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  ■ [Night Train]… takes place in a nameless ‘second-echelon American city’ (p.3) and, promisingly, is a takeoff on those [Dashiel] Hammett/ [Raymond] Chandler/[James M.] Cain ‘tough-guy’ detective stories behind noir films [that is, films such as The Maltese Falcon (1940), The Big Sleep (1943), Double Indemnity (1944)]. The hero, police detective Mike Hoolihan, is a heroine, a deep-voiced, 180lb, 5ft 10in former alcoholic, child-abused, Irish-American single woman in love with police work. ‘I am a police’ (p. 1) she announces at the outset, in the first of a number of American locutions new to this native speaker, and belts out her resumé in a typical burst of Amis lyricism:

  In my time, I have come in on the aftermath of maybe a thousand suspicious deaths … So I’ve seen them all: [j]umpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters. I have seen the bodies of bludgeoned one-year-olds. I have seen the bodies of gang-raped nonagenarians. I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at a t.o.d. [time of death] is to weigh the maggots (p. 4).

  This displays an excellent verve, holding out simultaneous hope of a thriller’s bloody satisfactions and the subtler pleasures of postmodern irony, the transmutation of a lowdown genre in the manner of Umberto Eco[‘s The Name of the Rose (1980)] or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s [Les Gommes (The Erasers) (1953)]. The puzzling crime in this: Jennifer Rockwell, a beautiful, intelligent, twentysomething, 5ft 10in, 140lb (no lightweight she) astronomer, is found sitting nude in a chair in her apartment, apparently a suicide. But, if so, she has shot herself three times in the mouth, and without apparent motive: she is widely admired, professionally successful, and happily mated with an associate professor of philosophy auspiciously named Trader Faulkner. Before her abrupt demise, they lived together for seven years, enjoyed a voracious sex life, and planned to marry and have children. Jennifer, furthermore, was the daughter of Colonel Tom Rockwell, a police higher-up who rescued our heroine Hoolihan from alcoholism some years ago …

  The novel’s style evinces the simple faith that repeating something magically deepens it… But the trouble … my trouble, the reviewer’s trouble - with [Night Train] isn’t the faux-demotic mannerisms or the heavy debt that Amis’s Oz of an America owes to frequently cited cop shows on the telly but with the unmentionable way the plot proceeds. My problem is with the solution of the mystery and the point of the book.

  Amis, beneath his banter, is a scowling, atrocity-minded author … In [Night Train] he makes us closely watch an autopsy and spotlights the void around us, not just the moral void, in which criminals ‘fuck a baby and throw it over the wall’ and ‘chop up eighty-year-olds for laughs’ (p. 84), but astronomical phenomena such as black holes, the missing dark matter, and the Bootes Void - ‘more nothing than you could possibly imagine. It’s a cavity 300 million light years deep’ (p. 94). Jennifer Rockwell, all 140 luscious pounds of her, mentally dwelt among these crushing immensities: she thought that Stephen Hawking cracked the problem of black holes because he ‘has been staring at death all his adult life’ (p.95). Within the astronomical equations, presumably, lies the clue. Detective Hoolihan, before going off on a self-destructive tear, speculates: ‘I sometimes think that Jennifer Rockwell came from the future’ (p. 147).

  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, wilful warmth that he admires in Saul Bellow: they seem quick-moving automata, assembled of mostly disagreeable traits. His fiction lacks what the late Queenie [Q.D.] 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.254 □

  Updike’s alarmed invocation of the ‘post-human’ suggests, of course, that he is applying humanist criteria to Night Train which may be inappropriate - though it is certainly possible to see Mike Hoolihan as a more sympathetic character than his review implies. The ‘post-human’ theme is echoed by the Booker prizewinning novelist Anita Brookner in her Spectator review of 27 September 1997:

  ■ The psychotic confidence of Martin Amis’s new novel is no less worrying because its subject is psychotic confidence, of a kind which raises suspicions of irony. It may be post-modern. It is certainly post-human. There are few facts that are without disclaimers, few acts that are unambiguous. To read it is to undergo a temporary brain dysfunction …

  Detective Mike Hoolihan … has to investigate the death of Jennifer Rockwell. Mike is a large, tough, slangy blonde with a damaged liver. Jennifer is the alpha female who works in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems. But Mike is also Philip Marlowe [the private detective in Raymond Chandler’s thrillers], with his not quite concealed aura of knightly chivalry. Mike goes down those mean streets into an explosion of brutal ellipses and aggressive abbreviations. What she finds out does nobody the slightest good and may even conceal the truth. But the truth is the most expendable commodity in a narrative which sets out to celebrate the demotic but ends up so out of hand that it is experienced as an assault on the reader’s good faith.

  Jennifer Rockwell is Mike Hoolihan’s weakness, in that the two are exact opposites. While Mike was abused as a child and taken into care, Jennifer came from a loving family of mother, father, and brothers. While Mike was drying out in the Rockwells’ spare bedroom Jennifer tiptoes in and reads to her. One night Mike gets a call to a suspicious death and finds Jennifer naked, on a chair, with a bullet in her head. It later transpires that there were three bullets, which would seem to rule out the possibility of suicide. When the body is opened up it is found to be in perfect order, with no sign of physical illness.

  Certainly there are anomalies. There are traces of lithium [a drug used to control manic-depression] in the brain, but lithium has never been prescribed by Jennifer’s doctor. There is the lover who was last seen on the street looking ‘distressed’ (p. 54). There is the crazy female flatmate who was later removed to Canada. There is the worrying incident at the lab, where Jennifer falsified a computer in an apparently ludic episode which may have been caused by too much concentration on dark matter. There is the uneasy man whom she may have picked up at the Mallard Hotel. There is the wholesale obfuscation occasioned by Mike’s police methods, which involve injustice, sentimental self-communings, and extreme economy with the truth. Above all there is the voice of the unreliable narrator, which is almost a mystery on its own.

  Did Jennifer commit suicide because she had seen into the heart of a black hole? We are becoming used to novels which are Open University courses in astrophysics and chaos theory (no bad thing). Jennifer’s work is mercifully never explained, but it seems to have left her as merry as a grig [an extravagantly lively person], apart from the incident with the computer. By the same token her lover may have been looking ‘distressed’ because on leaving Jennifer’s apartment he had torn his jacket on the door handle. Jennifer’s father … may have been a little too protective. The father is straight out of Chandler, as is the sinister atmosphere of the lawless city at night - except that this is a city almost totally deprived of its normal markers, as are sequential deduction and an unprejudiced perusal of the facts.

  The conclusion, which is inconclusive, will satisfy no one. Even the red herrings are unconvincing. Even more alarming is the brutal, soft-headed behavior of the detective, who does not so much conduct the enquiry as make it up as she goes along. The case is declared closed just as the reader demands that it be handed over to someone more competent. It may be that the whole thing is parodic. Such gam
es with verifiability are always exhausting, and if this is a game it is a subversive one.

  There is another mystery here. The novel is written in a thoroughgoing American idiom and is roughly the same length as Saul Bellow’s recent novella, The Actual (1997). It is even dedicated to Bellow and his wife Janis. The style may therefore be an attempt at homage, which is curiously off the mark. The point about Bellow’s style is not merely that it is American but that it is Yiddish - but, as Philip Roth [the American novelist] would say, this is the Yiddish of Flaubert. Bellow meanders round the minds of those who do not readily or easily reproduce current usage. Amis, on the other hand, goes native so wholeheartedly that there is barely a trace of his literary origins. Streetwise, and without a trace of honest intention, Night Train will delight those with raised but skewed expectations. I found it frustrating, and all the more so because I expected more from an author whose dithyrambic [wild, passionate] narratives have so engaged me in the past.255 □

  The unfavourable concluding comparisons with Saul Bellow made by both Brookner and Updike could also be found in Russell Celyn Jones’s review in the Times, which affirmed in its final paragraph that ‘Amis had built his career out of twentieth-century American voices, principally Bellow’s’; but whereas Bellow was ‘inimitable as an archivist of the human condition’, ‘Amis is just not in that league … Night Train is a slick fast ride but it lacks soul’. Jones also considers the novel in relation to the genre of the police procedural, contending that ‘there is something about Amis’s voice that seems at odds with this genre’, when he attributes to Hoolihan ‘[h]is mini-essays on the Big Bang and self-slaughter’.256 A similar point is made by Sean O’Brien in the Times Literary Supplement, when he says that ‘Amis seems uncertain of his relationship to the genre’ and underlines its supposed seriousness too anxiously. He concludes that ‘as a novella among other material in a collection, Night Train would be a striking curiosity, but as a thing in itself it must throw doubts on Amis’s literary wisdom’.257 Philip Oakes, in the Literary Review, thought it an effective ‘pocket thriller’ in which Amis used ‘familiar techniques to arrive at his own discoveries’, but that it had ‘little to distinguish [it] from many other current runners……Its weakness is that it does nothing different or better than what’s being done already’.258

  Natasha Walter, however, writing in the ‘Women’ section of the Guardian, felt that the novel did do something different and effective in Amis’s oeuvre because, by writing in a female persona, he had released aspects of feeling that had not been evident in his previous work:

  ■ Already, critics are acting surprised that Amis has taken this step; Amis, the man’s man, the writer the lads love, the guy whose heroines tend to be more tits’n’arse than thought and emotion.

  You can’t help wondering how on earth Martin Amis can take a woman’s point of view on life. He’s already had a go; his 1981 novel. [Other People] was told almost entirely from a female viewpoint, and it was probably his worst novel to date. It was telling that its beautiful heroine, Mary Lamb, was an amnesiac… [Other People] was about as convincing at depicting a woman’s world as [Take A Girl Like You], the 1960 novel Kingsley Amis wrote from a female point of view. His heroine was also a beauty and, though not an amnesiac, she was quite silly enough to be one.

  As a teenager, I remember reading [Other People] and [Take A Girl Like You] with a sort of fascinated horror. I knew Martin and Kingsley Amis were solidly important writers. And these novels showed how they believed women would think; maybe how they wanted women to think; maybe how all men wanted women to think. These dumb, beautiful, vulnerable women … weighed on me. How could intelligent men be guilty of such failures of imagination when it came to exploring a woman’s point of view?

  But that failure isn’t the inevitable result of male writers speaking in female tones. Men can also create very good female narrators. From the very first paragraph of [Night Train] … you can see its narrator is hardly the stooge of a cynical writer. Mike Hoolihan has an independent, determined spring in her step. More than that, Amis has clearly found that writing from a woman’s point of view has released unexpected emotion into his work. There is unfeigned sorrow behind this little thriller and a sense of direct intimacy Amis has not attempted before. It is as though by taking on a woman’s voice, he has found a franker, less ironic world than in his other novels.

  There is something almost shocking about watching a male writer feeling so easy in the guise of a woman. But it’s hardly unknown. On the contrary. It’s surprising how many of the finest moments in 19th and 2Oth century novels rest on just that somersault; a male writer, with no way of knowing first-hand what he is describing, suddenly leaps into a woman’s world and taps a spring of real emotion……

  [I]n the late 2Oth century[, m]en’s worlds and women’s worlds have moved so much closer together [than in the nineteenth and early twentieth century] that when a male writer takes on a woman’s voice, it doesn’t have to sound terrifically different from his own voice. Detective Mike Hoolihan, with her black pants and her wisecracks, her confidence and her straightforward relationships with men, isn’t always that far from Martin Amis’s own experience.

  But Amis is still crossing some sort of boundary in writing as a woman …259 □

  Adam Phillips, in the London Review of Books, agrees with Natasha Walter that the persona of Hoolihan allows Amis ‘a broader register of feeling than is usual in his narrators’ and acknowledges that Mike Hoolihan ‘(at long last) … “represents” the female voice in Amis’s boyish fiction’, but identifies her as ‘Martin Amis in drag’ and ‘glaringly,… brashly literary’. But this is only one set of observations in an appreciative and insightful review that grasps something of the complexity and power of the novel:

  ■ Self-consciousness, as a threat and a promise (the furtive logic, the demonic secrecy people live by), has been [Amis’s] great preoccupation, which makes suicide, especially the suicide of the nominally happy - the theme of Night Train - an obvious subject for him … Nothing makes people more other to us than their suicide. Nothing makes them seem both more and less the authors of their own lives. Every suicide, like every mid-life crisis, is a whodunnit. So after The Information, in its wake as it were, comes the far more troubled and troubling Night Train: a mock-thriller about a subject profoundly unmocked by its author. And one of Amis’s most interesting books.

  In a sense Night Train is two books, one of which could be called ‘A Reply to My Critics’… on a first reading some of the least convincing parts [of the novel] are those in which Amis tries to confront, if that’s the word, political correctness; or rather, his own much-vaunted lack of it……‘Allow me to apologize in advance’,… Mike Hoolihan … says very early on in the book, ‘for the bad language, the diseased sarcasm, and the bigotry’ (p. 4). Night Train tries to be partly about what there might be to apologise for……Hoolihan … seems unusually cultured (i.e., Oxbridge-cultured) for a middle-aged American cop … Amis often makes [her] sound like a slangy, street-wise academic.

  … In Night Train there is, in a sense, a character in drag called Martin Amis, who is the narrator of the book. Or, to put it another way, a character who is the opposite of the ‘real’ Martin Amis: ‘I used to be something’, the female cop Mike Hoolihan writes, ‘but now I’m just another big blonde old broad’ (p. 7). Hoolihan 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 (‘I had to do this alone and in my own way. It’s how I’ve always worked’ (p.45)); she makes umpteen literary allusions; she’s even in a biography ‘Discuss Group’ (p. 5)… it is too obvious that Mike Hoolihan, however much (at long last) she ‘represents’ the female voice in Amis’s boyish fiction - and she is, curiously, one of the most haunting narrators in Amis’s work - does not sound like a female cop in Homicide in [an American city
] (even though few of us have known any). A cop like Mike … would not, one imagines, write a book like Night Train, or ‘apologize … for any inconsistencies in the tenses (hard to avoid, when writing about the recently dead)’ and for the informalities in the dialogue presentation (p. 5). If there is a joke here, who is it on? And why does the writer have so much to apologise for? An apology, as Amis knows, is also a justification and an excuse. Like a suicide note, Night Train asks to be read more than once.

  … the effect of [Amis’s] often brilliant verbal delirium is to make things wordy and unreal, language warding off the experience it describes, whisking it away. So Hoolihan implausibly combines the thug and the poet … Hoolihan, as a device, as a shrewd and suspect invention, allows Amis a broader register of feeling than is usual in his narrators: some of it too deliberately assuaging of his critics but some of it extremely puzzling. And not in a trivially self-conscious way; partly because the novel is more subtle than Amis’s previous books about the terrifying mislogic of self-consciousness. Hoolihan doesn’t sound like she ought to sound, if she is what she says she is. What she … writes - the way she represents herself -doesn’t tally with what she is. Just like the faultlessly happy - ‘a kind of embarrassment of perfection’ (p. 7) - suicide, Jennifer Rockwell: at once the double and the nemesis of the narrator …