Bah. I have to get up for work tomorrow at 5:30 and then leave early to go to an interview. It's a second interview where I get to sell my talents to the director in the hopes that I can somehow gain a regular salary. If that happens I'll actually have to work. Really, really hard. It's an exciting opportunity; I'd be creating a library and I already have a process in mind to do it but wow. From scratch. So yeah.
I'm getting ahead of myself. It's very possible that someone with more experience will get the position. The only thing I can offer (other than my massive intelligence, of course) is my energy and that I'm cheap.
Wait, that doesn't sound right.
So I've finished Night Train by Amis. I don't even know what to think about it. It's difficult to tell exactly what it was supposed to be. Was it a joke? A parody? Noir? It seemed to play the grit straight but it had this attempt at humor running through it and I couldn't tell if it was meant to overturn the street dirt feel or not.
If it was supposed to be a parody he should have set it in a culture he knew well enough to get right. Or made it less rancid. Describing a mindless quiz show the boyfriend is watching, "What do Americans think is America's favorite breakfast? Cereal!... Where do Americans think France is? In Canada!" Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha ha. We get it, Europeans think we're stupid. That's not actually a joke, that's just an insult.
If it was supposed to be noir he should have taken it a bit more seriously; not that noir can't have humor, but his tends to undermine rather than accompany.
The whole thing is very self-conscious. It's like he couldn't forget he was an Englishman trying to write an American story (complete with spelling). You get the distinct feeling of looking at the whole thing with the eyes of an outsider, of watching something foreign. Of the author's unconscious "Those foreigners and their funny ways of doing things" attitude. The slip-ups in dialogue and action become more apparent because of this disconnect between the author's attitude smeared over everything and the story. He uses the slur 'beaners' in reference to Italians, talks about the numerous mafia hits found in rental cars parked in airport lots in what seems to be the Pacific Northwest, and uses the qualifier 'American' in phrases where a native never would. "American juries...American judges..." "Paulie No speaks perfect American..." The main character leaps around from one theory of how and why the victim died to another with no evidence or any hint she should be looking in that direction and goes from speaking like a truck driver to a middle-aged Southern woman.
Put the whole thing together and you get an amateur crime story with bigoted overtones.
Thing is, despite all the (hilarious) badness you can see he's a good author when he isn't pretending to be something he's not. I'll have to try something else by him.
Boy, that was kind of fun. I should read incredibly stupid books more often. It was also interesting. I've read books by American authors set in foreign countries. I should read more books by authors who aren't American that are set in the U.S. just to see what I come across.
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