Interviews
On Friday, January 23rd, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Martin Amis to discuss NIGHT TRAIN.
Moderator: Welcome online tonight, Mr. Amis. Do you have any opening comments for your fans?
Martin Amis: It is nice to make contact in this way. I have done many interviews on the Web, and I like meeting my readers -- even if it is electronically.
Teddy from Roosevelt Island, NY: Hello, Mr. Amis, I have been a fan for many years now. I am curious to find out your opinion of book reviewers. Do you read your reviews? Also, it appears to me that your critics are either in love with your work or hate it. Do book reviews carry any weight in your book?
Martin Amis: Well, book reviewing is a special case. When you review a movie you don't make a movie about it, but when you review a novel you write prose about it. There is a kind of rivalry. Book reviewing is a necessary thing: It is not necessary to novelists, but it is necessary to society. I am not influenced by reviews. One can always write a damaging review.
Nicolas Miller from Boulder, Colorado: Martin, I am curious to find out your intention in making NIGHT TRAIN's setting in "Anytown, U.S.A." I truly enjoyed NIGHT TRAIN, but my criticism is that the book overgeneralized the American police department. In my experiences with various police forces, there is a huge difference between, let's say, the LAPD and the police department in Mobile, Alabama. Thanks, I am a big fan....
Martin Amis: Well, I don't want to make it too specific, or too local, or too locked into a certain time. I read a lot of books about police precdure, but I wanted a kind of dreamlike vagueness and didn't want it tied to any one city. You always try to universalize and not particularize.
Paul from Morris Plains, NJ: I am curious to get your opinion of Will Self. Are you a fan of his writing? What are your thoughts on the whole John Major controversy?
Martin Amis: Well, Will is a good friend of mine, and I have followed him very closely since his first book. I encouraged him early on to concentrate on his writing and to give up on his day job. When he got busted on the jet, this was unfortunate for Will, but at least he was doing things on the grand scale. He reached for the sky. It is not like he got caught with half a joint...
Geoffrey Maturen from Ann Arbor, MI: I don't have a question, actually, just wanted to tell you that I finished reading MONEY a few days [ago] and enjoyed it quite a bit. Keep up the good work.
Martin Amis: My mother used to live in Ann Arbor, and I have a special fondness for the place.
Tonya from Seattle, WA: For years your writing has been criticized for its depiction of the female character. Was this a thought that crossed your mind in creating your lead in NIGHT TRAIN?
Martin Amis: No. That would come under the heading of answering the critics, which is not something that this writer does. To people who criticize women in my writing, look at my portrayal of men.
Tina from Studio City, CA: Will you be reading in the L.A. area in the near future?
Martin Amis: I am reading in San Francisco, but not in L.A. I will be in San Francisco at Kepler's Books at 7:30 on the 26th of January, and I am reading at Black Oak Books in Berkeley the following night.
Suzanne from Los Altos, California: I enjoyed all your books, but MONEY and THE INFORMATION are my favorites. I think a filmed version of MONEY would work with a director like Robert Altman (who directed THE PLAYER, another dark comedy about the movie business). Assembling an imaginary cast for MONEY has always been fun for me. Has anybody purchased the movie rights, and if so, who was it?
Martin Amis: There have been many options taken out for MONEY. But the furthest we ever got was with the actor Gary Oldman, who would have made an unsurpassable job.
Aimee from Mobile, AL: How difficult was it to get the language in writing this book? There's a distinction between words Brits use and words Americans use, and you seemed to get it down in NIGHT TRAIN. Was it hard to switch into that voice?
Martin Amis: No, it now comes quite naturally to me to write in an American voice. I did it in LONDON FIELDS. It seems almost like a second larynx for me now.
Chuck from Leadville, CO: Your writing seems to be progressing from realism in the RACHEL PAPERS to metafiction in LONDON FIELDS to a loosely realistic allegory in NIGHT TRAIN. Do you believe your fiction will become less realistic in the future?
Martin Amis: Good question.... Well, one can only look as far ahead as the next novel, and the one staring in my mind at the moment is borderly realistic but will also play with a central uncertainty that exists, inspired by recent discoveries in science. My next book is a collection of short stories. My short stories are a lot more fantastical than my novels; I don't know why that is.
Choppy from Seattle: With the name Colonel Tom, were you hoping to evoke the image of Tom Parker, Elvis's manager? I mean, how American can you get but to infer Elvis in NIGHT TRAIN?
Martin Amis: No, I wasn't making a reference to Elvis, although come to think of it the residence of the name does derive from the old hustler. Colonel Tom was always a villain to me because he never allowed Elvis to come to England.
David from Statesboro, GA: Is the subject matter of your novel DEAD BABIES a petulant effort to distance yourself from the stolid subject matter of your father's writing?
Martin Amis: On some deep unconscious level, conceivably, but one doesn't make decisions about what to write about. That all seems to derive on the instinctual level.
Marti from Oxford, MS: LONDON FIELDS has been hailed as your best literary effort; do you think this is your best work? If not, which is and why? And please don't say the latest book, like every other author says....
Martin Amis: Well, your books are like your children -- you try not to have favorites and you treat the runts as well as the others. I do sometimes think that LONDON FIELDS is the most unslagging of my novels. On the other hand, I think TIME'S ARROW is the most completely achieved. These days it is THE INFORMATI0N that interests me most. So one's opinion changes over time and will proabably never be absolutely settled.
Debbie from Heartland USA, Ohio: What type of research did you do for NIGHT TRAIN? Did you hang out with any female police officers?
Martin Amis: No, I read some nonfiction works by people who had hung out with such types. I was indebted to David Simon's book HOMICIDE. And I read a lot of noir thrillers, but research limits you to what you actually experience. And it is better in the end to allow the imagination full play. If you make it up, it has your stamp on it and is more likely to last.
Aaron from Bennington, VT: Greetings, Mr. Amis. I hear you have a tempestuous relationship with the media, especially in England. I don't mean to seem trite, but I'd like to know your feelings about Princess Di's death and the media's involvement, and shed some light on where you think the society has gone in terms of its hunger for gossip. Thank you.
Martin Amis: The response to Princess Di's death seems to me like a millennial phenomenon. As in the past, millennial hysteria takes the form of mass emotion, self-flagellation, and drastic overevaluation. It is also very close to violent. And I found the whole carnival disconcerting.
Hunter from Hattiesburg, MS: NIGHT TRAIN is one of the few examples of your novels without a writer figure hanging around in the fringes somewhere, if not actually providing the narration. I'm thinking of characters like Samson Young, Charles Highway, Martin Amis. Why did you decide to leave a writer out of this one?
Martin Amis: For generic reasons. I just didn't want the extra layer on this particular story. There seemed to be no room for such a figure, and I never considered squeezing one in.
Jack from Michigan: Do American readers receive your novels in ways different from UK readers? Are our questions perhaps more ingenuous?
Martin Amis: Perhaps they are. They are certainly less encumbered by a knee-jerk hostility that I encounter in England, where I have been accused of anti-Semitism and misogyny. American readers seem to get me. I can't understand why this is so, but it is.
Greg from Sylvania, GA: I've read that it is more important to be part of the literary Oxford clique in England than it is to have a fresh new voice when trying to publish a first novel; do you think this is true?
Martin Amis: No longer. English fiction has been democratized and reinvigorated by the Commonwealth writers -- Rushdie, Desai. The so-called Oxford Circle collapsed in exhaustion a generation ago.
Emmett from Dorset, VT: Which American crime novelists did you model this book after?
Martin Amis: The two who struck me as most vital and original were Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy.
Shelby from Newton, MA: I've heard that you model your characters after real people. Is this true? Did you base Mike [on] anybody?
Martin Amis: It is impossible to insert a real character into a real novel. The gravitational forces of the fiction will tug the character completely out of shape. On the other hand, you do have certain models in the back of your mind. But the transference onto the page has to be a fluid process.
Jack from Michigan: You are on a rather extensive American book tour. In the UK, do writers go on similar tours?
Martin Amis: Yes, we do, but the difference is that England only has one city, the capital. For us, Bristol is L.A., Dunningham is Chicago, Hull is Boston, and Portsmouth is Miami. As you see, they don't quite measure up.
Derek Martin from Montreal, Canada: Who do you pick to win the Australian Open? By the way, we here in Montreal consider Rudeski a traitor.
Martin Amis: It looks like Sampras. The drawer is opening up for him. And if the computers are to believed, he is almost twice as good as any other player alive. I commiserate with you about Greg, but we are also pleased to have him.
Moderator: Thank you for joining us tonight, Mr. Amis. I hope you'll join us again. What wise words would you like to close with?
Martin Amis: Just remember that reading is an art, and it is just as much under threat as writing. So please keep at it.