Oracle Night by Paul Auster: book review

Oracle Night (2003) is set in Brooklyn, New York, over nine days in September 1982.

Author Paul Auster’s narrator is a 34-year-old man Sidney Orr, married to Grace. Their friend is author John Trause. 

Sidney buys a blue notebook, and as soon as he does, his months of writer’s block, from a near-death accident, come to an end. He has a burning need to write again. He discusses this with John, and they both agree that some notebooks make you want to use only that brand, and make it easy to write.

What is it about that blue notebook? 

Sidney begins with John Trause’s suggestion. ‘There’s a novel in there somewhere’ he says about the Flitcraft episode in the 7th chapter of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon – in which Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy about ‘a man who walks away from his life and disappears.’

Sidney starts writing about book editor Nick Bowen, Nick’s wife Eva, and the woman who gives him a story to edit. Rosa Leightman has a story called Oracle Night written by her grandmother Sylvia Maxwell. Sylvia Maxwell’s story is … 

As you can see, this is a story set in a story based on a story. 

Paul Auster focuses on Sidney and John, but I like the peripheral characters. I like Ed Victory, the collector of telephone directories – and M.R. Chang, the owner of the stationery store Paper Palace – and most of all, Richard Ostrow, the brother of John’s second wife Tina, who died of cancer in 1974 (eight years earlier). Richard is an ‘anguished soul longing for the unattainable.’ Unfortunately, these peripheral characters are short-lived in the novel – or more accurately, given a short-showing. Richard appears again at the end of the book to good effect. 

The past, present, and future are depicted intricately in this novel – longing for the past, worried about the future, and afraid to think about the present. The characters – the lines between story characters and those who create the story are strangely surreal and often blurred – are linked together to show individual and collective angst. Mostly though, it shows the duality of authors within and without their craft – and whether the act of writing either lessens their angst or fuels it.

Not all plot lines are closed, some are left hanging for the reader to wonder what could happen next. I enjoyed this novel. It is a great, intellectual story that explores the art and process of writing – what makes a writer stop writing and what makes a writer start writing?

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).