clock … watching time, the only true currency

I didn’t enjoy Night Train from Martin Amis. The author is famous for many things, including being famous as a contrarian public intellectual. (English authors pull that off even better than the late Norman Mailer did in this country.) He’s not famous for this book, and he shouldn’t be. It’s brief, and the female policewoman (notably, “I am police”) actually raises our interest in the suicide which gives the book its jumping-off point. (Re-reading that…sort of unfortunate phrasing on my part. But the suicide was by gun, not plunge. Anyway…) But we’re left unsatisfied on purpose, and whatever art that took, it just annoyed me as a reader.

The 1998 NYTimes book review is more positive. I can see the points made by the reviewer, but he’s clearly a fan (or at least a consumer) of the entire Amis bibliography. I won’t rush to the next one.