E-Mail This Article to a Friend Delphic miseries Paul Auster writes himself into and out of a corner BY PETER KEOUGH

No doubt a master concordance could be made some day of all the characters, dates, deeds, and places in the fiction (and non-fiction) of Paul Auster. For example, in 1927, while Walter walks on water in Mr. Vertigo and Hector Mann makes his final films in The Book of Illusions, do they ever cross paths with the author Sylvia Maxwell as she writes Oracle Night, the novel within the novel within Auster’s latest novel, which is also titled Oracle Night? The possibility of making such connections is one reason Auster’s fiction is so exhilarating and frustrating, despite the sometimes rote prose and purple plotting. An elegant, immanent revelation always seems about to emerge from the elusive ends and means.

That revelation doesn’t come in Oracle Night, at least for this reader — or perhaps the lack of such closure is itself revelatory. Something more basic motivates its hero, Sidney Orr, a blocked writer recuperating from a near-fatal illness: the need "to live as though a future life were waiting for me." His first tentative steps around his Brooklyn neighborhood take him to "The Paper Palace," a stationery store run by a cryptic Chinese man not unlike the pet-store proprietor in Gremlins. Sidney settles on a blue Portuguese notebook and takes it home. He starts writing in it and can’t stop.

Orr and Auster take us through the writing process, demonstrating how a premise expands into a narrative, how elements of personal experience are reshaped into settings and characters. Sidney’s premise is one suggested by his friend John, an older, more successful writer — the "Flitcraft episode" in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, a digression about a man who’s almost hit by a falling beam and takes this brush with death as a sign to abandon his old life and start anew. In Sidney’s version, a man named Bowen is struck first by the beauty of the woman who presents him with a lost manuscript of Maxwell’s Oracle Night and then, perhaps redundantly, is almost struck by a falling gargoyle. At once he takes a flight to Kansas City, a place he’s never been before.

Sidney too has been struck — by the blue notebook. His wife, Grace, returns home while he’s writing but claims that he wasn’t there. Later, in his friend John’s apartment, which he has made into his hero’s in his work in progress, Sidney experiences a kind of dislocation:

"I had the strange, not altogether unpleasant feeling that I was entering an imaginary space, walking into a room that wasn’t there. . . . I was both a part of what was going on around me and cut off from it, drifting freely in my mind as I imagined myself sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, writing about this place in the blue notebook. . . ."

Those wacky writers. An analyst might suggest that Sidney’s sense of displacement is due to the repressed conflict he might have about the others in the room with him, John and Grace. Or perhaps some repressed conflict these two might have that Sidney suspects. Furthermore, Sidney’s two other narratives (five, actually, including a new screen version of The Time Machine and a lengthening series of "autobiographical" footnotes) might be variations on these conflicts. Or they might just be Auster’s own abandoned ideas, recycled here in a meta-fiction about the process and the point of writing fiction.

The hero of the blue notebook, for example, escapes his life only to be trapped in a variation of Sidney’s, sealed in a room surrounded by texts, his wife desperately searching for him. In Maxwell’s Oracle Night, the novel within the novel within the novel, the hero becomes an unwilling seer who tries to escape visions of his innocent wife’s future infidelity. Meanwhile, in Sidney’s own story, it’s the past that proves inescapable, and that because he succumbs to doubt, to the need to fill the empty pages of the notebook with what he fears might have been.

It’s not knowledge, however, but its absence that determines the end, or the lack thereof, of each tale. Ordinarily an author beguiled by coincidence and synchronicity, Auster here seems more concerned by the stories’ starting point, which in each case is Grace, who is both the character and the quality she embodies. Sidney describes her in terms of Dante’s vision of Beatrice in La vita nuova, going as far as to call her "the flame of being." Her silence commands acceptance of "the line she’d drawn between herself and words." Until that grand concordance of his works is created, the hope of crossing that line and attaining Grace is what drives Auster, and his readers, onward.

Paul Auster reads at the First Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street in Harvard Square, on January 27 at 7 p.m.; call WordsWorth at (617) 354-5201.