Oracle Night
January 04, 2009
ORACLE NIGHT by PAUL AUSTER
Popular authors such as Stephen King use the device of a novel within a novel as a way of drawing the reader in. Paul Auster uses it to shut them out. Auster’s peripatetic urban myths parallel the creative process, constantly reminding the audience that he's the one wielding the pen. He has even guest-starred in his own narratives, many of which unfold as their authors "write" them.
Sure enough, his eleventh is narrated by one Sidney Orr, a novelist with a hint of a surname. (It could be Sidney or Auster or...) Recovering from a near-fatal fall in a New York subway station, Orr enters a Brooklyn stationery shop to purchase an attractive blue notebook. After fussing over its proportions, he begins filling its blank pages with the story of the next nine days.
Inspired by an incident in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Orr begins a novel about a long-lost work by a third (forgotten) writer. This novel within a novel, in turn inspired by a novel is entitled - finally - Oracle Night. Later Orr develops writer's block and switches to writing a screenplay of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
The frustrating twist is another pun: an author abandoning a linear narrative inspired by a detective novel in favour of a circular reference to a story about time travel.
Poo-tee-weet, as Kurt Vonnegut once predicted. So it goes.
People who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing they like. People who don’t will find the roaring in their ears getting very loud. They shouldn’t. Auster's wanderings ��‡are a pleasant diversion. Although the picaresque structure of Oracle Night affects the voice of someone making it up on the fly, the tone is cheerful and assured. The author has been lost many times before: he knows where he isn't going.
The larger paradox is that Auster’s invention now runs to a formula. His travels into the unknown feel like daily commutes; his strangers like old friends. More than one critic has worried that he runs the risk of becoming a literary equivalent of Woody Allen, his self-references spiralling into a sort of neurosis. In the meantime, Auster’s nervous industry offers readers a light-hearted reward: the fun of a consistently unreliable narrator and a nostalgia for whatever happens next.
(Dominion Post)
Popular authors such as Stephen King use the device of a novel within a novel as a way of drawing the reader in. Paul Auster uses it to shut them out. Auster’s peripatetic urban myths parallel the creative process, constantly reminding the audience that he's the one wielding the pen. He has even guest-starred in his own narratives, many of which unfold as their authors "write" them.
Sure enough, his eleventh is narrated by one Sidney Orr, a novelist with a hint of a surname. (It could be Sidney or Auster or...) Recovering from a near-fatal fall in a New York subway station, Orr enters a Brooklyn stationery shop to purchase an attractive blue notebook. After fussing over its proportions, he begins filling its blank pages with the story of the next nine days.
Inspired by an incident in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Orr begins a novel about a long-lost work by a third (forgotten) writer. This novel within a novel, in turn inspired by a novel is entitled - finally - Oracle Night. Later Orr develops writer's block and switches to writing a screenplay of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
The frustrating twist is another pun: an author abandoning a linear narrative inspired by a detective novel in favour of a circular reference to a story about time travel.
Poo-tee-weet, as Kurt Vonnegut once predicted. So it goes.
People who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing they like. People who don’t will find the roaring in their ears getting very loud. They shouldn’t. Auster's wanderings ��‡are a pleasant diversion. Although the picaresque structure of Oracle Night affects the voice of someone making it up on the fly, the tone is cheerful and assured. The author has been lost many times before: he knows where he isn't going.
The larger paradox is that Auster’s invention now runs to a formula. His travels into the unknown feel like daily commutes; his strangers like old friends. More than one critic has worried that he runs the risk of becoming a literary equivalent of Woody Allen, his self-references spiralling into a sort of neurosis. In the meantime, Auster’s nervous industry offers readers a light-hearted reward: the fun of a consistently unreliable narrator and a nostalgia for whatever happens next.
(Dominion Post)