Rating: 
Summary: Auster's best in some time-probably better received by "fans
Review: "Oracle Night" clearly tends to elicit strong opinions, pro or con. I thought it was his best novel in quite some time. Some of the elements sound disjointed (e.g., those mentioned in some of the more negative reader & editorial reviews, like the abandoned book idea), but actually work well in the narrative. One subtext of the book is the writing process and, although I don't work in a literary framework, I noticed many recognizable parts of the writing process that cut across genres. Auster's familiar elements are present--coincidence, premonition, etc. and he needlessly repeats his color scheme from the weakest of the NY trilogy books. Sometimes these elements work better than others and the book lacks the polish and integrity of Moon Palace, which I think is his strongest early work. There's also a distracting use of footnotes to accomodate Auster's asides and take them to sometimes excessive length.
Criticism aside, what grabbed me from the start was his measured, spare prose. A number of years ago, I saw Auster give a reading in Washington DC and, in the best passages, I could picture him reading the words in his own unobtrustive tone. The prose, the descriptions of the people, their situations, and the backstory are all engaging and the result is great storytelling, with an eye toward detail and character.
This book will appeal more to "fans" than to people who haven't read Auster before. I suspect that newbies will have a lesser opinion of this novel. The New York Trilogy (1st & 3rd books, the 2nd strikes me as an experiment and gimmicky) and Moon Palace are better places to start. The trilogy books are rougher, but show the development of his storytelling style and elements that he uses in later books. Moon Palace pulls things together better and does it in places outside of Auster's more typical New York surroundings.
Rating:
Summary: We live in the present, but the future is inside us
Review: "Thoughts are real... Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about... Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future." (pp.221-2) Picking up on the Flitcraft episode from "The Maltese Falcon" - in which a man's response to a near-death experience is to walk out on his life - Paul Auster's eleventh novel tells the story of nine days in the life of writer Sidney Orr. Recovering from a serious illness, Orr begins a sketch for a novel in his new blue notebook, and it seems to have an oracular influence on his life. As always with Auster, this delicious conceit is just the way into something far more serious and, on this occasion, a veritable babushka doll of plots involving time travel, Portuguese stationery, mysterious manuscripts, prophecies, a love triangle, a nuclear shelter in Kansas City, and the 1937/8 Warsaw telephone book. Some reviewers have decried the lack of resolution to some of the stories Auster's characters kick around, but can you really expect a piece of postmodern metafiction to offer you a neatly resolved, Grisham-style plot? Still, I couldn't put this down. I read it in a single afternoon, mainly because I found the ideas so compelling. Auster's theme here is the imagination, or more specifically the literary imagination. Is the kind of imagination at work in storytelling a way of ordering the chaos, a way of tracing - or creating - patterns of meaning in the randomness of life? Do we write about what is already happening beneath the surface of our selves and our relationships? What is the price of this? Does such art do violence to the lives it touches by way of appropriation? (If you like this theme, then I strongly recommend "What I Have Written" by John Scott - another highly literary and erotic piece of metafiction involving untimely death and a mysterious manuscript.) Auster fans will find much that's familiar in "Oracle Night": the notebook, the locked room, the poverty-stricken writer suddenly flush with money and time, and even Boris Stepanovich popping in from "In The Country of Last Things". But there's something new here, too: a real sense of playfulness and fun that was lacking from some of Auster's earlier work.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: A novelist with writer's block (Auster) writing a novel about a novelist with writer's block (Orr) struggling to write a story about a man who walks away from his life (Nick). If you think this is a clever premise, you won't once you've read Oracle Nights. Auster hooks the reader with a compelling start, but that only heightens the disappointment once you realize that you're on a rollercoaster to nowhere. Auster is now on auto-pilot; there's nothing in this novel that he hasn't done more effectively in other works. Marco Fogg walks away from his life in Moon Palace, as Nick does in this book. Ed Victory's compulsive and seemingly senseless cataloguing of phone books mirrors Flower and Stone's wall in Music of Chance. Stories within stories and New York vistas feature prominently as always. This novel reads like assorted threads of Auster-isms randomly assembled, some of which are pulled together in a flat, unsatisfying conclusion and some of which are left dangling. Not recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Classic Auster fails to hit the mark
Review: As big a fan of Auster that I am, it is through grated teeth that I admit that this isn't one of Auster's better pieces of fiction. Though this clever novel harps back to the days of New York Trilogy, with intricate devices involving books within books, blue notebooks, despair, and references to Thoreaux, the final, brutal, climactic paragraphs seem too rushed and leave many questions, and character feelings, unanswered. To a certain extent this is Auster's point, but any potential Oracle Night had is lost. Having said that, the book is littered with classic Austerian imagery, from complex stories-within-stories to the mysterious M.R. Chang and Ed Victory and it's these alone that make Oracle Night worth reading. Maybe not in Hardback!
Rating:
Summary: Fantasy and Reality
Review: As other customer reviews indicate, you'll either hate or love Oracle Night, depending perhaps on whether you are enchanted by/interested in your dreams. For Oracle Night, like much of Auster, is dreamlike: intermeshed images from different story lines follow each other in seemingly random order; different levels of the story are intertangled, so "reality" and "fantasy" conflate; there is a panic-evoking dead end with no way out; you feel yourself immersed in a nested set of dreams -- when you think you have awakened, you are still dreaming. Auster tells the story of Sidney Orr, who is writing the story of Nick Bowen, who in turn tells the story of Sylvia Maxwell, who has written the story of Lemuel Flagg. But it's not as neatly stratified as that, for the events of different strata keep on jumping to others. Lemuel Flagg, a clairvoyant, kills himself to avoid a fate he sees for himself. After narrowly missing death, Nick Bowen pursues a new fate, but ends up trapped in a locked room. Orr's wife, knowing nothing of the Bowen story, dreams of being trapped in a locked room just like Bowen's. Orr himself, recalling Flagg's end, destroys his "fiction" writings, which he feels will summon an unwanted fate. During all this, Orr muses on stories of time travel and the paradox of causation implicit in them. The ancients thought dreams foretold the future; Freud taught that dreams explain the past. In Oracle Night, Auster paints a more complex, nonlinear picture of fantasy and reality: spaghetti-like, they intertwine. In the jumble, our fantasies both are caused by and cause reality; it's hard to distinguish the two.
Rating: 
Summary: Oracle Blight
Review: Auster claims that he wrote "Oracle Night" in a trance. Well, it's a shame no-one snapped him out of it, just to alert him to the fact he was mostly writing drivel. Then again, it must be obvious to even the most rabid Auster fan that his writing's been going down the tubes ever since the clunky, melodramatic "Leviathan". Granted, most writers tend to repeat themselves from book to book, but Auster's writing has become a tired parody of his earlier work. He simply doesn't possess the tools to pull off a great novel. His prose is vacuous and cliche-ridden, his dialogue dreadful, his plotting hackneyed, and his quasi-intellectual ideas stale and laboured (please, no more books about writers, and no more novels within novels within novels). There seems to be an idea going around that Auster will be remembered as one of the great novelists of our time, but much more of this amateurish nonsense, then sadly he'll only be remembered as a hack.
Rating:
Summary: Master Storyteller Dramatizes the Telling of Story
Review: Auster is a daring formalist. When 20% of a book is a about the attendant problems involved in the writing of a story that ends up unfinished -- and that this story is mesmerizing -- then you know you are in the hands of a master storyteller. ORACLE NIGHT is a first-person narrative which, through its pristine spinning of tales from the past, the future and the imagination, expands into a pitch-bendingly profound meditation on consciousness itself. The act of creativity is central to Auster's thesis of how the mind interacts with reality (and perhaps even causes future events). I have never read a book in which the act of writing has been so effectively realized through the act of reading. All the problems of "making something out of nothing" are pondered and dramatized so that the reader feels like an accomplice rather than an audience member. The fact that Auster's sophisticated, multi-level performance is accomplished with such "readability" still astonishes me. This entertaining, entrancing book makes for a great introduction to Auster's work. (My holding back a fifth star is only because I reserve such a rating for a true work of genius.)
Rating:
Summary: Better than his last one, but still not up to his best
Review: For the first half, ORACLE NIGHT seems promising -- it's easily the best thing Auster has written since LEVIATHAN. (Unfortunately, that just means it's better than the dreadful MR. VERTIGO, the slight TIMBUKTU, and the dense, unsatisfying BOOK OF ILLUSIONS.) However, Auster can't sustain it: The story-within-a-story reaches an impasse and gets abandoned (why? it was the most interesting thing in the book!), while the "real" story goes off in bizarre directions that cross the line between intriguingly peculiar and outright cartoonish. (When the owner of the stationery store takes the main character to a Chinatown whorehouse, it works -- it's a bit strange, but in a properly Austerian [Austere?] way, and you go along with it. When the man's store mysteriously disappears and reappears and then he starts attacking the main character with "karate chops," you just roll your eyes and conclude that Auster has lost his marbles...or at least his previously excellent ear for what works and what doesn't.) And the ending is wholly unsatisfying -- hugely anticlimactic and adding up to nothing much. I loved THE MUSIC OF CHANCE, MOON PALACE, and LEVIATHAN, and though it was a little too self-consciously clever for its own good, THE NEW YORK TRILOGY as well. But ever since those, Auster's been unable to regain the level of quality that once seemed to come so easily to him. There are delicious bits in the new book, but not a whole book's worth of them. Here's hoping that Auster returns to form some time soon.
Rating: 
Summary: old friend
Review: have been reading auster since i was an undergrad at columbia. just finished oracle night. clever, intricate, consumed with the same tensions about self-worth (in terms of relationships and reputations) that go back throughout all of his work.
Rating:
Summary: Thankfully tons better than Timbuktu and Book of Illusions
Review: He was starting to scare me after the absymal Timbuktu and the only slightly better than horrible Book of Illusions, but Auster seems mostly back on track. The slam-bang ending makes it impossible for me to rank this one up with what I feel are his best (New York Trilogy and Leviathan) but it's worth a read for every Auster fan at least, and not even the worst introduction to the uninitiated.
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