Commonly for fiction writers the choice of a fiction-writing protagonist constitutes the worst sort of laziness, a failure to exercise the very imagination they are paid to exploit. In the beguiling "Oracle Night", however, Paul Auster has taken the inherent self-consciousness of a novelist narrator to such painstakingly layered extremes that the strategy seems anything but lazy. In remarkably few pages, Mr Auster builds up a marvellously thick ply of wallpapers, and it is delectable to peel away the little rose pattern to reveal the stripes underneath.
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