Night Train Review

NIGHT TRAIN by Donald O'Donovan
reviewed by Eric Chaet

How would you like to read a novel that scares the hell out you, then fills you with hope? It's about a man who lives on the streets of Los Angeles, taking dozens of low-level and dead-end jobs, and the people he meets, most of whom are living similarly--men and women and children, too--some handling it with relative grace, some falling apart.

"Ferdie would stand up in the front of the bus and talk to her, this driver, talk, talk, talk, about the weather, or about his pet rabbit, or how he got a new pair of shoes, the most inane and boring sort of patter, and all of it voiced with great sincerity and enthusiasm. And the driver would say, “That’s wonderful, Ferdie,” or “What’s your rabbit’s name, anyway?” and like that, humoring him, encouraging him, when all the while she could just as easily have said, “Get back behind the white line. Don’t talk to the driver while the bus is in motion.” And I always thought she should have made the headlines, this driver, or maybe there should be another kind of newspaper, a different sort of newspaper, a newspaper that features, instead of the usual crap about robbing, raping and killing, a headline like, 'Someone behaved decently!'"

"I came to a big farmers’ market. Everything looked so scrumptious and I didn’t have any money. Suddenly the place was crawling with cops. There was no place to go, so I dived into a bush. It was dark in there. The foliage was amazingly thick, almost as if I had a tarp over my head. A man was crouching there, inside the bush, filthy, a real ragamuffin, and he was munching a baguette. Without a word he broke the baguette in two and solemnly handed me half of it. His fingers were black, shiny with ground-in dirt, but I was hungry and the bread was good. I grabbed his hand and thanked him. He grimaced and pointed to his mouth. Apparently, the man was a deaf mute. I had ventured into his hooch. His bedroll was on the ground along with some sheets of cardboard and empty cans. He’d made a little place for himself inside that bush, in the middle of a teeming city in the San Fernando Valley. You couldn’t see him from the street, you’d never have known he was there. We shared some wine, and then I left. It was Biblical, this experience with the bread and the wine, it was Communion. It was...documented proof that there are still some goodhearted people in the world, even if you have to dive into a bramble bush to find one."

The main character, responding to a friend's talk about revolution, tells him that no revolution will ever change the way the world is--winners and losers, dominant and dominated. The world would always beat people like them up, whoever ruled.

And, "The poor are every bit as corrupt and mean-spirited as the rich, every bit as greedy and avaricious. We just deal in smaller sums...the ragged protoplasm of the streets."

“All your life,” one of the dozens of characters the main character rooms or otherwise pals with, says, “all your life, it seems to me, you have to listen. You have to listen to people talking at you, people who don’t know shit when they’re standing in it. When you’re a kid, you have to listen to your parents, and you have to pretend that it means something to you, even though it backs up in your throat until you want to puke your guts out. Then the bastards pack you off to school, and the lousy teachers are standing over you—middle-aged failures, all of them, especially the young ones—shooting off their traps, blowing their stinking breath in your face. Next comes the Army, and it’s the goddamned sergeant who tells you what to do, and what to say, and what to think, and what to believe. If you’re lucky enough to come away from your tour of duty with your arms and legs intact, you get yourself a job. Now, it’s the boss who reads you your fucking rights while you stand on the carpet with your hat in your hand. By this time you’ve gotten pretty good at getting along in the world, which means you know how to kiss everybody’s ass and walk humble and say yes when you mean no. Then you get married, and the wife starts in on you. She doesn’t want to hear this and she doesn’t want to hear that, and couldn’t you show a little respect....”

Another prays, “Dear God, please make me believe that life has some sort of meaning and purpose.”

One says, "It’s only as a human being that I’m a failure! And I was filled with such joy! Tears were streaming down my face. My life had completely gone in the toilet, but I was alive, walking around, breathing, eating, digesting, blood circulating through my body, all taking place automatically. I didn’t have to do anything.... It was all gone; the guilt, the burden of failure, all of it, lifted from my shoulders. It doesn’t fucking matter! And it’s beautiful now. I’m rowing downhill, man. It’s all gravy from here on out. If you don’t have anything riding on the race, who gives a fiddler’s fuck which horse wins?”

As yet another job evaporates under him, the main character tells us, "It’s time to hit the bricks. At least they’re not going to euthanize us. But they might as well. The street is reeling us in, feeling us up, sniffing at us, salivating. We’ll soon be masticated by the slavering jaws of the city."

This novel disturbed my sleep--and it will disturb my rest for a long time to come, too, I think. I kept reading because I was starving for its honest revelations about our contemporary shared situation. I'll take being disturbed over being lulled to death, and I don't run into such honesty often--and then, rarely in some contemporary's work, almost only in work from the past.

Which leaves me to grapple with walking down a city street among people unwilling to break their illusion up with eye contact, and others whose desperate condition makes ME afraid to make eye contact with THEM, or listening to the terrible evening news, with insane propaganda masquerading as reasonable commentary, alone, with whatever I can come up with out of my own nature, education, and experience.

If I survive having read this novel, I'll be stronger.

One other thing I'd like to say:

The author and the main character, who is clearly his representative, lives as I've read that bacteria live. Bacteria can and do exchange bits of their DNA without the necessity of sexual reproduction. They affect one another. Their individuality is anything but exclusive. The main character wanders around unmerciful Los Angeles, hooking up, sexually or not, with one person or group after another. His lack of exclusivity drops him deep into danger, squalor, hunger. But it saves him--in that he runs into opportunity after opportunity--to earn money, for sex, for food and drink--for all of which he has an appetite undiminished by sorrow, regret, resentment, bitterness of any sort. Yet, somehow, the person himself, in a sort of pure integrity, keeps emerging, as though out of primeval soup. I don't know how he does it. I don't intend to forget about it. It seems important to me.

It's not the way I was raised, and I bet it's not the way you've been raised, and it's not the way we are being advised by almost everyone who is advising us, is it?

O'Donovan's work is in the tradition of Celine, Henry Miller, Bukowski--among the greatest of novelists, of artists--but it's pure Donald O'Donovan. If you run into him, and you have two sandwiches--give him one! Say that Eric Chaet told you to, please. Say that Eric Chaet finds it impossible to hide from his fear, anywhere near so well, but that he feels less alone in the cruel and collapsing civilization, as a result of reading "Night Train."