Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105175 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-01
• Released on: 2004-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
In Oracle Night, Paul Auster returns to one of his favorite themes: writing about writers and the act of writing. Recovering from a severe illness that has left him weak and prone to nosebleeds, struggling novelist Sidney Orr takes the suggestion of his mentor, the acclaimed novelist John Trause, and begins a story about a man who, upon considering a near-death experience as an omen (or excuse), walks out on his wife and begins a new life. Nick Bowen, Orr's protagonist, moves to Kansas City and finds work with a man engaged in creating a sort of catalogue of all known persons from a warehouse filled with phonebooks. Dressed in Goodwill clothing, Nick finds it "fitting to don the wardrobe of a man who has likewise ceased to exist--as if that double negation made the erasure of his past more thorough, more permanent." Grace, however, acts strangely soon after Sidney begins the "novel-within-a-novel" in a mysterious blue notebook.

Auster uses footnotes to provide interesting backstory and develops Sidney's insecurities regarding love and fidelity, but when Sidney hits a patchy spot and writes Bowen into a corner, he (and Auster) shrugs and drops the story. The mystery that seemingly unrelated coincidences may have a causal connection is left unresolved, and Trause's delinquent son shows up to facilitate a hollow, climactic ending. Auster is a gifted writer, to be sure, but once trapped by the inner story, Oracle Night loses steam. --Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly
One morning in September 1982, a struggling novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness purchases, on impulse, a blue notebook from a new store in his Brooklyn neighborhood. So begins Auster's artful, ingenious 12th novel, which is both a darkly suspenseful domestic drama and a moving meditation on chance and loss. Reflecting on a past conversation and armed with his new notebook, Sidney Orr is compelled to write about a man who walks away from his comfortable, staid life after a brush with death a contemporary retelling of the Flitcraft episode in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Orr's description of his fictional project takes over for a while, but through a framing narrative and a series of long, occasionally digressive footnotes, he teasingly reveals himself, his lovely wife, Grace, and their mutual friend, the famous novelist John Trause. While Orr's hero finds himself locked in a bomb shelter, Grace begins behaving strangely, the stationery shop is shuttered, John's drug-addicted son looms menacingly in the background and the blue notebook exerts a troubling power. The plot of this bizarrely fascinating novel strains credibility, but Auster's unique genius is to make the absurd coherent; his stories have a dreamlike, hallucinatory logic. The title comes from the name of the novel that appears within the story Orr is writing, and hints at the book's theme: that fiction might be at some level prophetic, not merely reflecting reality but shaping it. There is tension, however, between power and impotence: as Orr puts it, "Randomness stalks us every day of our lives, and those lives can be taken from us at any moment for no reason at all."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
A writer recovering from a mysterious life-threatening illness begins to write in a notebook that has, it seems, the supernatural power to draw him into the very story he is writing. And the story, as it happens, is a reworking of Dashiell Hammett's idea about a man who, after nearly dying, flees a comfortable family life. That nothing is what it seems is standard-issue Auster metaphysics, and the narrator here seems familiar, too—literary, Brooklyn-based, decent, if a trifle self-serious. What saves Auster's story from ponderousness is the sheer verve with which he follows his narrator through the labyrinthine plot. He barely has characters, or none more substantial than you'd find in a nineteen-thirties murder mystery, but he shines as a fabulist and tale-teller, putting a high-modernist gloss on noir by leaving his tales within tales within tales unfinished.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A Misleading Use of Anton Mesmer's Surname
To find this novel "mesmerising," as its publishers apparently did,you would need to be pretty easily mesmerised. Likewise, to agree that it "reads like an old-fashioned ghost story," you would need to have read some pretty disappointing examples of that genre.

What, in fact, it does read like is one of those pieces of fiction very popular with "literary" novelists who have got to come up with something for their publishers but lack worthwhile ideas and so fall back on writing about writers and writing. This is, in my view, an uninspired and self-indulgent example of its kind and for Henry Holt and Company to claim
it as a basis for dubbing Paul Auster "one of the boldest and most original writers at work in America today" sounds to me like sales-promoting dishonesty or sheer self-delusion.

Anyone who wants to send me a stamped, addressed jiffy-bag is welcome to my copy of the book (which I bought first-hand but very cheap) for nothing! It appears to be one of the original edition, in a blue jacket-cover, with page-edges made to resemble those of a book of sermons by a Victorian divine.

What Oracle?
Not sure what Auster's intentions were for this one other than to provide the reader with a series of novel treatments that he never got around to writing. Tied together by the narrator's relationship with Grace and a famous author who used to be Grace's lover, it failed to provide closure at every level.

Strong Mixture of Traditional and Experimental
Stylistically somewhere between The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night encompasses what I loved about both.

Auster gives us a bit of a plot, but there is also much experimentation in this rich novel as well. And, like with The New York Trilogy, if you are a fan of linear storytelling with a concrete introduction, body, and conclusion, Oracle Night may not be for you, though there are elements of all three.

That being said, Oracle Night was a captivating read with deeply charismatic characters who were not difficult to emotionally connect with at all. However, there are many (literal) footnotes and several asides, all of which I enjoyed immensely. Unfortunately, I'm not certain a casual reader would feel the same.

So, all in all, if you're an Auster enthusiast, this is more greatness from a wonderful writer. If you're unfamiliar with Auster but are open-minded and interested in trying out a mixture of traditional and experimental storytelling, I think you'd like Oracle Night. However, if you're into more conventional storytelling, I recommend Auster's Mr. Vertigo or The Brooklyn Follies.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant