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Oracle
Night by Paul Auster Rating: •• (Mildly
Recommended) |
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Recovery Two
convalescing writers use each other to clear writer’s block and lead life to
follow art on the pages of Paul Auster’s new novel,
Oracle
Night. If you’re in the mood for a literary novel that’s readable, dark
and unusual, give Oracle
Night a chance to capture your attention. Here’s an excerpt from pages 46-55: Saturday nights in New York are always crowded,
but that night the streets were even more packed than usual, and what with
one delay and another, it took us over an hour to get home. Grace managed to
flag down a cab right outside John's door, but when we climbed in and told
the driver we were going to But Grace wasn't only upset by stupid cabdrivers
that night. A few moments after we got into the second taxi, she inexplicably
began to cry. Not on a large scale, not with some breathless outrush of sobs, but the tears started gathering in the
corners of her eyes, and when we stopped at Clarkson for a red light, the
glare of the street lamps swept into the cab, and I could see the tears
glistening in the brightness, welling up in her eyes like small expanding
crystals. Grace never broke down like that. Grace never cried or gave way to
excessive shows of feeling, and even at her most stressful moments (during my
collapse, for example, and all through the desperate early weeks of my stay
in the hospital), she seemed to have an inborn talent for holding herself together,
for facing up to the darkest truths. I asked her what was wrong, but she only
shook her head and turned away. When I put my hand on her shoulder and asked
again, she shrugged me off—which was something she had never done before. It
wasn't a terribly hostile gesture, but again, it was unlike Grace to act that
way, and I admit that I felt a little stung by it. Not wanting to impose
myself on her or let her know I'd been hurt, I withdrew to my corner of the
backseat and waited in silence as the cab inched southward along I didn't believe her. My body was on the mend,
and it seemed implausible that Grace would have been so disheartened by
John's fleeting leg ailment. Something else was troubling her, some private
torment she wasn't willing to share with me, but I knew that if I kept on
bounding her to open up, it would only make things worse. I reached out and
put my arm around her shoulder, then drew her slowly toward me. There was no
resistance in her this time. I felt her muscles relax, and a moment later she
was curling up beside me and leaning her head against my chest. I put my hand
on her forehead and began stroking her hair with the flat of my palm. It was
an old ritual of ours, the expression of some wordless intimacy that
continued to define who we were together, and because I never grew tired of
touching Grace, never grew tired of having my hands on some part of her body,
I kept on doing it, repeating the gesture dozens of times as we made our way
down West Broadway and crept toward the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn't say anything to each other for several
minutes. By the time the cab turned left on Grace let out a small laugh when she heard the
malapropism—What means that?—and I took it as a sign that her funk was
lifting. I settled back into the seat to resume stroking her head, and as we
mounted the roadway of the bridge, crawling along at one mile an hour,
suspended over the river with a blaze of buildings behind us and the Statue
of Liberty off to our right, I started to talk to her—to talk for no other
reason than to talk—in order to hold her attention and prevent her from
drifting away from me again. "I made an intriguing discovery
tonight," I said. "Something good, I hope." "I discovered that John and I have the same
passion." "Oh?" "It turns out that we're both in love with
the color blue. In particular, a defunct line of blue notebooks that used to
be made in "Well, blue is a good color. Very calm, very
serene. It sits well in the mind. I like it so much, I have to make a
conscious effort not to use it on all the covers I design at work." "Do colors really convey emotions?" "Of course they do." "And moral qualities?" "In what way?" "Yellow for cowardice. White for purity.
Black for evil. Green for innocence." "Green for envy." "Yes, that too. But what does blue stand
for?" "I don't know. Hope, maybe." "And sadness. As in. I'm feeling blue. Or,
I've got the blues." "Don't forget true blue." "Yes, you're right. Blue for loyalty." "But red for passion. Everyone agrees on
that." "The Big Red Machine. The red flag of
socialism." 'The white flag of surrender." "The black flag of anarchism. The Green
Party." "But red for love and hate. Red for
war." "You carry the colors when you go into
battle. That's the phrase, isn't it?" "I think so." "Are you familiar with the term color
war?" "It doesn't ring any bells." "It comes from my childhood. You spent your
summers riding horses in "Compete at what?" "Baseball, basketball, tennis, swimming,
tug-of-war—even egg-and-spoon races and singing contests. Since the camp
colors were red and white, one side was called the Red Team and the other was
called the White Team." "And that's color war." "For a sports maniac like me, it was
terrific fun. Some years I was on the White Team and other years on the Red.
After a while, though, a third team was formed, a kind of secret society, a
brotherhood of kindred souls. I haven't thought about it in years, but it was
very important to me at the time. The Blue Team." "A secret brotherhood. It sounds like silly
boys' stuff to me." "It was. No . . . actually it wasn't. When I
think about it now, I don't find it silly at all." "You must have been different then. You
never want to join anything." "I didn't join, I was chosen. As one of the
charter members, in fact. I felt very honored." "You're already on Red and White. What's so
special about Blue?" "It started when I was fourteen. A new
counselor came to the camp that year, someone a little older than the rest of
the people on the staff—who were mostly nineteen- and twenty-year-old college
students. Bruce . . . Bruce something . . . the last name will come to me
later. Bruce had his BA and had already finished a year at "And he invented the Blue Team?" "Sort of. To be more exact, he re-created it
as an exercise in nostalgia." "I don't follow." "A few years earlier, he'd worked as a
counselor at another camp. The colors of that camp were blue and gray. When
color war broke out at the end of summer, Bruce was put on the Blue Team, and
when he looked around and saw who was on the team with him, he realized it
was everyone he liked, everyone he most respected. The Gray Team was just the
opposite—filled with whining, unpleasant people, the dregs of the camp. In
Bruce's mind, the words Blue Team came to stand for something more than just
a bunch of rinky-dink relay races. They represented a human ideal, a
tight-knit association of tolerant and sympathetic individuals, the dream of a perfect society." 'This is getting pretty strange, Sid." "I know. But Bruce didn't take it seriously.
That was the beauty of the Blue Team. The whole thing was kind of a
joke." "I didn't know rabbis were allowed to make
jokes." "They probably aren't. But Bruce wasn't a
rabbi. He was just a law student with a summer job, looking for a little
entertainment. When he came to work at our camp, he told one of the other
counselors about the Blue Team, and together they decided to form a new
branch, to reinvent it as a secret organization." "How did they choose you?" "In the middle of the night. I was fast
asleep in my bed, and Bruce and the other counselor
shook me awake. 'Come on,' they said, 'we have something to tell you,' and
then they led me and two other boys into the woods with flashlights. They had
a little campfire going, and so we sat around the fire and they told us what
the Blue Team was, why they had selected us as charter members, and what
qualifications they were looking for—in case we wanted to recommend other
candidates." "What were they?" "Nothing specific, really. Blue Team members
didn’t conform to a single type, and each one was a distinct and independent
person. But no one was allowed in who didn't have a good sense of
humor—however that humor might have expressed itself. Some people crack jokes
all the time; others can lift an eyebrow at the right moment and suddenly
everyone in the room is rolling on the floor. A good sense of humor, then, a
taste for the ironies of life, and an appreciation of the absurd. But also a
certain modesty and discretion, kindness toward others, a generous heart. No
blowhards or arrogant fools, no liars or thieves. A Blue Team member had to
be curious, a reader of books, and aware of the fact that he couldn't bend the
world to the shape of his will. An astute observer, someone capable of making
fine moral distinctions, a lover of justice. A Blue Team member would give
you the shirt off his back if he saw you were in need, but he would much
rather slip a ten-dollar bill into your pocket when you weren't looking. Is
it beginning to make sense? I can't pin it down for you and say it's one thing or another. It's all of them at once, each
separate part interacting with all the others." "What you're describing is a good person.
Pure and simple. My father's term for it is honest man. Betty Stolowitz uses the word mensch.
John says not an asshole. They're all the same thing." "Maybe. But I like Blue Team better. It
implies a connection among the members, a bond of solidarity. If you're on
the Blue Team, you don't have to explain your principles. They're immediately
understood by how you act." "But people don't always act the same way.
They're good one minute and bad the next. They make mistakes. Good people do
bad things, Sid." "Of course they do. I'm not talking about
perfection." "Yes you are. You're talking about people
who've decided they're better than other people, who feel morally superior to
the rest of us common folk. I'll bet you and your friends had a secret
handshake, didn't you? To set you apart from the riffraff and the dumbbells,
right? To make you think you had some special knowledge no one else was smart
enough to have." "Jesus, Grace. It was just a little thing
from twenty years ago. You don't have to break it down and analyze it." "But you still believe in that junk. I can
hear it in your voice." "I don't believe in anything. Being
alive—that's what I believe in. Being alive and being with you. That's all
there is for me, Grace. There's nothing else, not a single thing in the whole
goddamn world." It was a dispiriting way for the conversation to
end. My not-so-subtle attempt to tease her out other dark mood had worked for
a while, but then I'd pushed her too far, accidentally touching on the wrong
subject, and she'd turned on me with that caustic denunciation. It was
entirely out of character for her to talk with such belligerence. Grace
seldom got herself worked up over issues of that sort, and whenever we'd had
similar discussions in the past (those floating, meandering dialogues that
aren't about anything, that just dance along from one random association to
the next), she'd tended to be amused by the notions I'd toss out at her,
rarely taking them seriously or presenting a counterargument, content to play
along and let me spout my meaningless opinions. But not that night, not on
the night of the day in question, and because she was suddenly fighting back
tears again, engulfed by the same unhappiness that had swept over her at the
beginning of the ride, I understood that she was in genuine distress, unable
to stop breeding about the nameless thing that was tormenting her. There were
a dozen questions I wanted to ask, but again I held back, knowing that she
wouldn't confide in me until she was good and ready to talk—assuming she ever
was. We had made it over the bridge by then and were
traveling down The
process of writing brings Trause and Orr back to
living life fully, following their illnesses. For an unusual visit to Steve
Hopkins, February 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Oracle
Night.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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