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Review [published March 2005]
Paul Auster: Oracle Night
Stephen Mitchelmore
Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read
since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every
book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely
readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability
to stop reading him once a book is begun.
However, in the end, with Leviathan, I felt this was
too much. I read it abnormally quickly, devouring each
page with less and less concern for what was written
on it than for getting beyond that page and to the next
page, and the next, to see what was there.
After the last page I was mentally exhausted, nursing
a headache. It seems significant that I have no memory
of the narrative except for the mental image of a forest
to which a character – perhaps the main character –
removes himself. The proliferation of anecdotes – or
stories within stories – means one can’t see the wood
for the trees.
The experience of reading Oracle Night is very similar.
It’s almost impossible to put the book down as there
are so many compelling stories, one after the other,
even though this is a relatively compact novel (240
pages). I’m sure I’ll forget most of the stories, but that
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isn’t important. Nor is Auster’s distinctly unpretentious
prose style important. If you wince at clichés like back
in the swing of things and to all intents and purposes
that appear on the first half page alone, think of them as
stabilisers for the roller coaster ride ahead. (Elsewhere,
I read that Auster breaks through his writer’s block by
typing regardless of the banality of the prose.)
There are two central narratives in Oracle Night –
both told by Sidney Orr, a New York writer recovering
from an unnamed illness that was expected to kill him.
He hadn’t written anything in a year until discovering
a blue notebook in a small stationery shop (that isn’t
stationary at all in fact. It disappears overnight.) Anyway,
the new notebook somehow enables Orr to write
a story. Much of Oracle Night is that story.
I don’t want to summarise the plot here as it is
characteristically involved and would also detract from
the essential element of Auster’s novels. The essential
thing is something impossible to convey outside of the
narrative itself: the evocation of possibility. At each
step in the story – when Orr enters the stationery store
to discover the blue notebook, when he returns to his
020
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