Thursday, February 12, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Story within a story

By John Ziebell

Paul Auster's first novels certainly marched to the tune of a different aesthetic. Contrary to the literary tone of the times, they gleefully privileged existential concerns, abused notions of plot and used philosophical constructs in place of characters. Auster changed gears in the 1990s, and while his books were still quirky and intellectual, they focused more on the development of story and character than his early metaphysical puzzles. The novel Oracle Night is a step back in time, sort of; while the tale echoes the esoteric exercises of The New York Trilogy, it also shows the hand of an author who's come to terms with what readers expect.

Oracle Night is constructed around a standard literary conceit, a story within a story--or, perhaps more accurately, a fiction within a fiction. The book opens with New York novelist Sidney Orr making a surprising recovery from a vaguely defined but potentially terminal illness. The doctors, he tells us, had actually given up hope: "[A]nd now that I had confounded their predictions and mysteriously failed to die, what choice did I have but to live as though a future life were waiting for me?"

What choice indeed? Auster loves narrative instability, and the choices his characters make often just mark another point on a global graph of coincidence. Orr is walking aimlessly around his Brooklyn neighborhood when he decides it's time to begin writing again. Making a random stop at a stationer's store, he encounters both a blue Portuguese notebook and the store's Chinese proprietor, one M.R. Chang; though the incident seems mundane enough, both the book and Chang will send his life along a new and unplanned trajectories, like the bumpers of an old pinball machine. And they're not alone. Orr is also goaded on by his friend and fellow writer John Trause, who is older, wiser and less artistically insecure; by his wife, Grace; and by any number of other real-life intrusions, from crimes to newspaper columns, that he immediately feels the need to intellectualize.

Orr begins a novel based on the Flitcraft episode from Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, the greatest conundrum in the private detective's casebook. Almost killed by a falling beam as he passed a construction site, Flitcraft simply disappeared to duplicate his life in another city; an act wholly without motive. Orr's protagonist Nick Bowen, along similar lines, abandons the New York publishing industry for a surreal form of exile in Kansas City.

Orr seems oblivious to the fact that while his fictional world comes together, the real one is rapidly fragmenting. The story swells as footnotes begin to take over the page; these are commentary on Orr's own life, raised by happenings in Nick Bowen's world, but all visions of the past. Orr is obsessed with the story of a famous French author who, when life imitated art once too often, quit writing because he was convinced words could truly kill, yet he seems to miss the real-world fact that his wife, Grace, is obviously coming unglued. He is finally overwhelmed when he writes his character into a virtual corner--a locked room, underground, with no reasonable egress built into the story--just as he begins to see how imprecisely he's been reading the real events around him.

In the end, Auster does keep his agenda from overpowering the story itself, and while it's not clear exactly what he might be saying about the philosophical responsibility of fiction, the book does offer an interesting exploration of the way writers--or at least writers in Auster's world--think about this stuff.