AUSTER AFTERNOONS.(The Talk of the Town)

"Isn't there supposed to be a reading here in about twenty minutes?" I asked. . . . "It was cancelled," the bartender said. "With all that slop out there today, there wouldn't have been much point to it. Poetry's a beautiful thing, but it's hardly worth freezing your ass off for."

This interchange takes place early in Paul Auster's novel "Leviathan." As his readers know, many small happenings in his novels have an uncanny prescience about them; and this one in particular seemed likely to be confirmed by reality the other day, when the first blizzard of winter blew in, muffling streets and minds. That afternoon, Paul Auster was to begin reading his new novel, "Oracle Night," in its entirety, in two four-hour sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, at the Paula Cooper Gallery, on West Twenty-first Street.

Close to the appointed hour, people straggled in from the outside whirl, with much stamping of boots and shedding of coats and scarves, entering the long upstairs gallery, warm and well lit, where a hundred and sixty chairs waited in silent rows. Bit by bit, they were taken over by occupants, who made small camps out of them, often clutching fresh copies of the novel, until some fifty expectant souls faced a small table, bearing only a microphone and a bottle of water. Jack Macrae, co-proprietor, with Paula Cooper, of 192 Books, the bookshop that was fathering the event, congratulated the members of the audience on their presence, explained the proceeding--a full reading, with a break every hour--and introduced Auster, who, tall and grave and dressed in gray, took his seat at the table, book in hand.

With little preamble, he began to read, in an even tone, holding the book in one hand, his eyes fixed on the page. Sometimes during the reading, his free hand would parse the prose with finger movements, like a miniature conductor. "Oracle Night" is written in the first person, which made it easy for the author to be its narrator; and, as the story began to ...