Paul Auster’s Oracle Nights is a novel about a young, rising novelist writing his way into the realization that his wife has had a lengthy intermittent affair with an older, very successful novelist–to the point that the wife, when she discovers she’s pregnant,isn’t sure about the father.
That’s the gist of this tale, which does not descend into real darkness until the very last pages, when the young writer, looking back on things twenty years later, pieces together the realities in much the same fashion that a master detective unravels a mystery while everyone stands around waiting for him to finally point to the real demon, or demons, responsible for the crime.
The result, for me, is a book that makes writing yourself into a corner its theme, ending with a too pat denouement. I regret that because the first nine tenths of the novel are fun to read. Even as imaginary dead ends show up, fragments of stories are left hanging, the book still has élan, vividness, and elegance, giving one confidence that Auster will have something good up his sleeve when he finally interweaves all the tales within the tales he’s spun. But as fewer and fewer pages are left to read, one begins to realize that he won’t have time to do that; he’ll have to take a shortcut, sharply altering the tone of the book and making the normal difficulties of life (of which there are many) absolutely tragic.
This is ineffective trickery, high-handedness, and an option to go noir instead of ironic because irony is a more delicate operation. I just didn’t buy the systematic exposition of why so and so did such and such, and the abandonment of three or four story lines (admittedly or apparently fictionalized by our narrator Sid) left me dissatisfied. There are lots–lots!–of figures and characters and incidents whose intrusion into this text ultimately are not justified, and that’s a pity because many of them offer a lot of promise when they’re introduced. Not even a concerted effort to analogize the fictional with the factual (although of course the whole novel is fictional) is likely to render some kind of thematic, if not narrative, consistency.
For some reason this book’s genially hurtling style reminded me of Poe , specifically The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, although I should have taken that as a warning. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym also has a bewildering ending, short on clarity, but at least Poe makes no attempt to spell things out, much less depict a brief moment of happiness after a cascade of horrors.
For more of my comments on contemporary fiction, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).
Robert Earle
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