Fiction/Collected Prose: Paul Auster's latest novel is a hall of mirrors - nay, a veritable Versailles of storytelling. Oracle Night is a contradiction in terms - a gripping narrative that sets out to disappoint its reader, writes Mary Morrissy.
The action, which covers nine days in September 1982, opens with Sidney Orr, a novelist recently recovered from a near-fatal illness. During his convalescence, he returns to writing unexpectedly after purchasing a blue notebook from a stationery shop in Brooklyn. The blank pages of the notebook - far from presenting the usual terror for the writer - seem to provoke Orr into a creative storm. He starts writing a story, inspired by a minor character in Dashiell Hammett's novel, The Maltese Falcon. The character, Flitcraft, is almost crushed to death on the street by a falling beam. The incident convinces him that the world is a place of chaos and chance. Subsequently, he walks out on his wife and his business and goes to another city to start a new life. The near-death experience frees him to live again. The attraction of the story for Sidney Orr - himself a survivor of a brush with death - is obvious.
Mirroring Flitcraft, the protagonist in Orr's story - Nick Bowen - is a successful man, an editor in a New York publishing house, happily married and professionally fulfilled. Bowen is almost struck by a limestone gargoyle which falls from an apartment building near his home, grazes his arm and shatters into a thousand pieces at his feet. Shaken - and stirred - Bowen boards a train to Kansas (the land of Oz?) armed only with his briefcase, which contains the manuscript of a newly discovered novel entitled Oracle Night, by Sylvia Maxwell, a long dead author.
Stranded in Kansas without money, Bowen strikes up a relationship with a mysterious taxi driver, Ed Victory, who takes him in and offers him a job in his Bureau of Historical Preservation, a strange underground kingdom, a library obsessively filled with telephone directories from all over the world, dating back to 1945. And there Sidney Orr's inspiration falters.
So, we are reading the story of a novelist writing about an editor, reading a novel with the same title as the one we are reading. Are we to expect realism? Well, no. It becomes clear as Auster's narrative continues, using all sorts of inter-textual tricks and typographical conceits - lengthy footnotes which form part of Orr's back-story, facsimile reproductions of telephone directories and newspaper cuttings, (W.G. Sebald has a lot to answer for), and a synopsis of a screenplay of H.G.Wells's The Time Machine - that we are in a strange, illusory, interior state. The reader is constantly asking herself - which world am I in now? Orr's? His hero, Bowen's? Or the world of Sylvia Maxwell's manuscript?
But it is not all plain sailing for Orr and the notebook to which he ascribes a Muse-like power. He runs into various literary reversals - not least with his protagonist, Bowen, whom he manages to lock into a sealed room in Ed Victory's underground bunker with no possibility of escape. It is at this stage, when he has written himself into a corner, that he turns his attention to the plot of his own life, where he realises all is not what it seems.
His clearly troubled, newly pregnant wife and her relationship with old family friend John Trause becomes a source of sordid speculation, and Orr's guilt and deceit over a sexual indiscretion of his own seems to echo strangely in his fiction. Has the strange notebook predicted the rents appearing in the fabric of his life, or has he merely transcribed them subliminally into his now-stalled work?
There is a filmic, dreamlike quality to some of the sequences: the brothel scene in which Orr cheats on his wife is like something out of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, while the underworld of Ed Victory's bureau is pure film noir, the hatch into a kind of existential hell.
Oracle Night reads alternatively like a whodunnit, a ghost story, a fable, a dream narrative. But it is ultimately a novel about itself. Sidney Orr - patrician, introverted, solipsistic - transforms the details of his life into a stymied work of art. But the reader is stymied in the process. The story Orr is writing ends up stranded in the locked room; neither do we get to the climax of the Oracle Night manuscript written by Sylvia Maxwell. The feverish virtuosity of the plot turns keeps the reader going, but at the end we are left wondering what it's all in aid of. To reveal the many lives an author lives while writing? To prove that every work of art is a failure? To show how the author manipulates reality? Or how he manipulates us?
Auster's Collected Prose is also a tribute to tale-telling. A compendium of occasional pieces, critical essays, book prefaces and magazine articles, it represents a rich seam of anecdote and an impressive breadth of reading, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan and Knut Hamsun. Shame, then, that it peters out at the end with a section headed 'Occasions', consisting of various polemical pieces on homelessness, New York, Salman Rushdie, the death penalty, and - most disingenuous of all - an article entitled 'Random Jottings on September 11, 2001 at 4 p.m.', written on that fateful day. There is nothing random about any writer sitting down on that day to write, and certainly not in reproducing it two years later.
These pieces are too transitory, too tied to their time and too slight to merit inclusion, particularly when compared to the emotional heft of 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', a sorrowful excavation of the author's father, who was a teller of stories too - surprise, surprise - most of them not true. Except for the one story Auster's father never spoke of - in which his mother murdered his father in front of him when he was aged seven.
'The Red Notebook' - which appears in the tantalisingly titled True Stories section; can we really believe him? - is an eerie echo of its blue counterpart in Oracle Night. In it, Auster documents a series of first-hand experiences - and serendipitous anecdotes told to him - between 1972 and 1990, including a sojourn in Sligo when his first wife had recourse to the famed firm of lawyers, Argue and Phibbs. (This delights Auster, who has a weakness for metaphorical names.) Each story begs the next in this piece of worked jottings, fashioned in much the same way as Oracle Night. Which is where we came in - the tall tale and the extravagant coincidence. The very stuff of Auster's fiction.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and critic. She also teaches on the creative writing programme at the University of Arkansas
Oracle Night. By Paul Auster, Faber, 243pp. £15.99
Collected Prose. By Paul Auster, Faber, 512pp. £25