Night Train, a parodic but nevertheless lacerating 1997 novel by the accomplished Martin Amis, son of British novelist Kingsley Amis and a writer who takes on the nightmares of our time such as the Nazis, Stalin and nuclear weapons, is an unusual mystery novel turning on our inevitable and human delving into the nature of the Cosmos and which echoes Pascal’s terror at the vastitude of the universe(s). Night Train seems a mystery novel with growing relevance to the spirit of the current times nearly three decades since its publication. The narrative is from the viewpoint of a tough female detective, Mike Hoolihan, whose afflicted presence might make you wrongly think her the chief actor in a drama that is truly and, near its end, suddenly and shockingly profound. Hoolihan, a homicide detective in an unnamed city, is a recovering alcoholic who was sexually molested as a child and, as the story begins, demoted to lesser police work as she battles her past and her addiction. But she is asked by a former boss and friend, Tom Rockwell, to gather herself and regain her homicide-solving skills to try to answer the question, why did Rockwell’s daughter, the young, beautiful, well-off and notable astrophysicist, Jennifer Rockwell, apparently commit suicide by shooting herself, seemingly multiple times, in the head? Emphatically, Rockwell cannot believe his daughter took her own life. Rockwell suspects Jennifer’s science colleague, Trader Faulkner, but Hoolihan, taking on the investigation, finds Rockwell’s suspicion implausible. Faulkner proves guiltless. Hoolihan sees that Jennifer’s suicide is the reality. Amis then opens up a vast and radical vision: Hoolihan discovers that before Jennifer’s suicide the renowned astrophysicist had suddenly begun to act uncharacteristically, making errors in her work, linking-up in a hotel with a philandering salesman, and taking lithium. Hoolihan suspects that Jennifer, imagining her father would seek an investigation, was conducting misdirection! And now Jennifer was also doing so quite carelessly in the deepest sense. Hoolihan’s search finally and unerringly leads to Jennifer’s advanced study of the Cosmos, a study bringing Jennifer increasingly to reflect on its inhumanly vast scale and seemingly ultimate inscrutability, with this growing and finally terrifying revelation ending her natural search, now seemingly pointless, for meaning in human life. And most salient here, Amis crafts these searing words from one of Jennifer’s science colleagues when he, famous from a popular TV show he conducts, is questioned by Hoolihan: But there are holes in our knowledge bigger than the Bootes Void (in far distant space and familiarly known as The Great Nothing)…(which is) …a cavity 300 million light years deep. …the truth is that human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the place they’re living in. We’re all retards. Einstein’s a retard. …We live on a planet of retards. …Newton, Isaac Newton, used to stare at the sun…. He’d blind himself for days, for weeks, staring at the sun. Trying to figure the sun out. …Then (Jennifer) quoted some aphorism. ….Went something like: “No man can stare at the sun or at death with …an unshielded eye.” …(Jennifer further) said: “Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.” As Night Train closes, Hoolihan, recovering alcoholic, heads for a bar to take the forbidden, fatal drink. Here “Night Train” is far more than an old jazz standard. And from the 1600s, we are left with this famous and beautiful confession anticipating Jennifer Rockwell, Amis’s modern scientist of the Vastitudes: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. –Blaise Pascal