Oracle Night: A Novel [Paperback]

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.

A novel that expands to fill volumes in the reader's mind,Oracle Nightis a beautifully constructed meditation on time, love, storytelling, and the imagination by one of the great writers of our time (San Francisco Chronicle).

1. How does the three-dimensional viewfinder that John Trause speaks of serve as a symbol for the novel? Think of its evocation as a magic lantern.

2. Discuss the use of color inOracle Night, not simply the blue notebook, but his tinted descriptions of the city and his extended discussions of bodily fluids on page

3. Sidney describes his discovery of (and subsequent productivity in) the blue notebook as a little piece of black magic. How is coincidence a force in the novel? How does Sidney, and his creations, react to these mysterious encounters and occurrences? Does he - or they - believe in fate?

4. Why do you think the doors to Ed Victory's Bureau of Historical Preservation have no doorknobs? Is this an idea from another part of the novel made physical in Nick's story? Furthermore, what other sorts of ephemera from Sidney's life manifest themselves in Nick's world?

5. What of Sidney's feelings for Grace are projections of his feelings about himself? Think in particular about Sid's fraught reaction at Grace's disappearance directly after feeling guilty for attending Chang's strip club?

6. Return to page 210 of the novel. As Sidney re-evaluates the notebook and it's influence on his life, he in some way announces that his story ends here? Is hlc®