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Hamilton Spectator
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
In her gripping whodunnit ‘Fox,' Joyce Carol Oates jolts with a superb twist ending
Have you ever wondered why turkey vultures are bald? The answer is not pleasant. Turkey vultures feed on the viscera of dead animals, and sliding their heads into and out of carcasses — preferably through the anus — is easier without feathers. Turkey vultures are scavengers; they see opportunity where others can't bring themselves to look. In this they bear some resemblance to serious novelists, like Joyce Carol Oates , who, at 87, has made an astonishing career in part by turning over what others wouldn't touch, sliding into the darkest orifices, pushing forward until she's found all the tenderest bits. Her novels can be hard to stomach, but for this she can blame reality. Some truths are revolting. Oates's latest novel is 'Fox' (Hogarth), which begins at the Wieland Swamp in southern New Jersey, where turkey vultures circle ominously over what turns out to be a human corpse. At first, the corpse is unidentifiable — due to 'significant animal activity,' as the police chief puts it — but is found alongside a vehicle belonging to Francis Fox, a popular new teacher at the prestigious local prep school, the Langhorne Academy. 'Fox,' by Joyce Carol Oates, Hogarth, 672 pages, $42. In an interview with People , Oates described the novel as a 'classic whodunit,' and the unfolding of the police inquiry — and multiple related storylines — is mostly propulsive, despite the novel's 672 pages and some tiresome stylistic tics ( so many words are in italics ). The most impressive structural feature is the superb twist ending. This is a book that continues to change shape until the very last page. But the novel's real interest lies in its anatomy of the crimes of Francis Fox — a predator, as his name implies, who preys on his middle-school students — and the institutions and norms that make his behaviour possible. Oates does not seek out the origins of his conduct in some childhood trauma or — as in the case of 'Lolita''s Humbert Humbert — a thwarted erotic encounter, but in Fox's own sense of superiority. Fox is the product of a partial Ivy League education — he was ejected from a Columbia PhD program for plagiarism — and the heir to a Romantic tradition that insists on the individual's right to transgress convention in pursuit of his own personal ideal of beauty. Fox quotes Blake and Thoreau as his grandiloquent authorities — 'God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages' — as he flatters himself that his obsession with prepubescent girls is a sign of esthetic refinement. Fox keeps a bust of Edgar Allan Poe — who married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia — on his desk, and fills his apartment with the paintings of the controversial French Polish painter Balthus, best known for his prurient portraits of very young female models. In this way, Oates's analysis of child abuse goes beyond the psychology of the criminal to indict American society, where every educated child is expected to know Poe's poems and where Balthus's portraits hang in the Met. On a more immediate level, the adult characters in 'Fox' are guilty of extreme neglect. In the same interview with People, Oates described Fox as a 'charming con man,' but the novel has no sympathy for the adults who let themselves be conned. Teachers on hiring committees neglect to look into Fox's past, though several red flags call out for closer scrutiny. Later, rather than raising alarm bells, the attention Fox receives from his female students elicits jealousy from his petty colleagues. Parents, too, are fooled by Fox, and lulled into a moral stupor by their reluctance to believe the worst. Even those who harbour suspicions prove unwilling to jeopardize their professional status by levelling accusations against a teacher who has made himself a favourite of the headmistress. One of the few adult characters to see through Francis Fox is a lawyer Fox hires to help him through his first scandal with a student. (Fox tries to quote Kierkegaard to the lawyer: ' The crowd is a lie … The individual is the highest truth. ') The lawyer has nothing but contempt for Fox, but professional pride makes him pursue the best possible settlement for his client — an outcome that all but ensures that Fox will be able to continue teaching. How did things get so bad? The novel hints that the community's (almost complete) failure to stop Fox has something to do with the fragmentation of the community itself. The rich and the poor of 'Fox''s Atlantic County have almost nothing to do with each other. Instead, the locals — 'poor whites,' 'old families that have failed to thrive in the twenty-first century, left behind by the computerized, high-tech economy' — are filled with resentment for the smug nouveau riche who try to ignore them while enjoying a much more comfortable existence, one they seek to make hereditary by sending their children to Langhorne and onward to the Ivy League. Political scientists like Katherine Cramer have been warning of the growing rents in the American social fabric caused by the increasing distance between the well-off and the hard-done-by. As Cramer and her co-author put it in a recent piece in the Hill , 'Constitutional democracy flourishes when people feel common purpose with one another, and it is impossible for people who never come into contact to build that common purpose.' The institutions depicted by Oates serve not to advance a common purpose — or enforce a shared morality — but to prop up the strivers while grinding down the rest. This is an unflattering portrait, but not a hopeless one. Over a long and illustrious career — including a National Book Award for Fiction (1970), a National Humanities Medal (2010) and a 'by the same author' page in 'Fox' that looks like the sides of the Stanley Cup — Oates has sometimes been accused of trafficking in moral turpitude for its own sake. A 1991 review of 'Heat and Other Stories' claimed that 'Ms. Oates … is as cavalierly cynical as a teenager. Her stock in trade is precisely not to be shocked, and she pretends to be equally, mildly, analytically interested in all forms of human behaviour, however grotesque.' But 'Fox' reads more like a quiet jeremiad against complacency and hypocrisy, masquerading as a coolly analytic murder mystery. In a 1972 article about the role of literature in America, Oates claimed that the serious writer must recognize that his or her destiny is inescapably 'part of the nation's spiritual condition.' More than 50 years later, Oates has become an integral part of her nation's spiritual condition, circling its revolting truths as the tireless turkey vulture circles a kill. A weak stomach is no excuse for looking away.
The Hill
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
BlueAnon: Unhinged writer Joyce Carol Oates thinks Trump faked the Butler attack
In the mainstream media's telling, conspiracy theories are something that belong almost exclusively to the media's enemies on the political right. The COVID-19 pandemic helped make this framing more popular among liberals. Today, progressives often belittle, mock, and sneer at their conservative friends and family members for supposedly believing in kooky, fringe ideas. Indeed, I talked yesterday about one liberal thinker, a former Obama speechwriter, admitting that he used to snub a more conservative leaning family member for disagreeing with him about vaccines. But I'm here to tell you that it's not just those zany right-wingers who believe in crazy conspiracy theories. Elite, smart, morally praiseworthy liberals fall for insane ideas, too. And here's a perfect example: Joyce Carol Oates, a well-known and popular author and teacher of creative writing, and a card-carrying member of the liberal establishment. Joyce Carol Oates seems like exactly the kind of person who would shun a rightwing family member for being wrong about COVID, or Trump, or any number of subjects: you name it. But does Joyce Carol Oates admit to believing some kooky things? Of course not. And yet look what she wrote on X yesterday, on the first anniversary of the Trump assassination. 'While anyone from a shy child to a Green Beret veteran would duck down immediately in a panic, shrink away from having been struck in the head (by a pebble, let alone a bullet), instead [Trump] stood up proudly & raised his fist for photographers, without hesitation,' she wrote. 'Is it unreasonable to assume that only a person absolutely certain that there would be but a single shot, that he was not in any danger, could possibly behave as [Trump] behaved? Yet the media would have the public believe this. as if it's some sort of insider joke or code like pro wrestling kayfabe where, though you know wrestling is scripted, you must not say so, nor will anyone else.' In other words, she thinks the Trump assassination was a false flag operation. Trump or his supporters, she is saying, arranged for a fake assassination in order to garner sympathy for Trump and orchestrate the legendary photo of him bravely standing up and raising his fist, for political advantage. And if you don't think it's clear she's saying that, her follow-up tweets remove any doubt. 'It seemed rehearsed, the positioning of officers to allow a hokey publicity shot of [Trump] with a fist raised for a MAGA poster,' she wrote. 'The call 'shooter down!' certainly came quickly; how could anyone possibly know that there wasn't a second shooter? Secret Service would surely be more thorough.' She then added: then added: 'impossible to believe that in the confusion & panic of that moment anyone in his right mind would wish to stand up & face another bullet.' The attempt on President Trump's life, one year ago in Butler, Pa., was not staged. It was real. It was perpetrated by a deranged gunman, who wounded Trump in the ear. But for the grace of God — or some higher power, or fate, or sheer dumb luck — Trump narrowly avoided being killed. A man in the crowd behind the president, Corey Comperatore, was not so lucky. The devoted husband and father died because someone tried to kill Trump. It's not fake. It's not made up. It's not part of some plot. It wasn't intended to be a photo op or a campaign tactic. How Trump reacted in the moment was real, and did in fact show real courage. You can certainly be mad that it helped him politically — that the way he handled the situation resonated with, and impressed, many Americans. But you can't deny that it was real. If you do, then you are a conspiracy theorist. Oates ought to know better — but this radar isn't really about her. Forget Q-Anon. This is BlueAnon. And it's just as false and harmful and offensive.
New York Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
What Do Conservatives Offer Universities?
Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard University, searching after greater ideological diversity, is considering creating some kind of institute with a mandate to hire faculty members with nonprogressive perspectives on the world. Around the same time the novelist Joyce Carol Oates published a post making sport of these sort of efforts, whose argument I will reproduce in full: most universities & colleges surely have faculty members who are contrarians? liberals & progressives are always quarreling with one another; 'the left eats its own'; hiring conservatives per se will result in very lopsided résumés especially in the sciences. really, research universities should hire physicists who disbelieve in modern physics? anthropologists who believe that 'Aryans' are the master race? poets who believe in Rhyming? philosophers who are staunch Thomists, or believe in the Creation? historians who don't acknowledge slavery in the US? what a clown show, a sort of campus 'Book of Mormon.' I love, indeed adore, the idea that 'poets who believe in Rhyming' and students of Thomas Aquinas — two categories distinguished by their unusual rigor, in my experience — are from the Oatesian perspective the equivalent of Aryan supremacists and some imagined set of 'historians who don't acknowledge slavery.' But the first part of the post asks a question that deserves a serious response. Why don't academic contrarianism and quarrelsomeness alone suffice to introduce students to diverse perspectives on the world? Why can't we just rely on the intelligence and curiosity of good professors, even if almost all of them happen to lean leftward, to deliver a complete portrait of intellectual debate? The simplest answer is that contrarianism is quite unnatural to human beings, and only slightly less unnatural among people theoretically trained in rigorous intellectual work. Indeed sometimes a life spent in intellectual work can make conformity seem more natural. After all, if everyone around you is a professional scholar and everyone tends to agree about certain crucial questions, shouldn't you be deferential to this shared expertise? Of course nobody wants to imagine himself to be boringly orthodox in every way. But even an impulse toward open-mindedness and heterodoxy still tends to be constrained and channeled into safe territory. Oates's own post suggests one way that this happens. ''The left eats its own,'' she writes, describing the climate of fervent enmity that often exists within left-wing factions that seem from the outside to basically agree. But of course it's precisely that agreement that makes it feel safe to have the angry arguments! You can play the contrarian and the heretic, even develop blood feuds and ruthless personal rivalries, without straying too far outside the safety of received opinion. The interpretive battle rages fiercely but the normative perspectives remain carefully constrained. Another way that contrarianism constrains itself is by showing a certain intellectual curiosity about the distant past, a territory in which forbidden authors or dangerous ideas can be encountered from a purely historical perspective — and then returning to the safety of conformism once it comes to deal with the controversies of today. That's what you see at work in the syllabus of Columbia's core curriculum, which I wrote about last year. The assigned readings for the world before the 20th century represent a reasonable diversity of worldviews and opinions. But once you reach contemporary controversies, the core's perspective narrows to a frankly insane degree, with almost exclusively environmentalist, de-growth and anticolonial texts assigned to help students understand 'the insistent problems of the present.' There are certainly left-leaning teachers and intellectuals who manage to do better than the Columbia core, who actually try to do real justice to contemporary controversies, who are willing to give not just centrist or classically liberal but even conservative and reactionary ideas their due. But in the current academic landscape, even the successful teaching of controversy still tends to confirm progressivism as a default perspective. For a sense of how this works, it's worth reading a working paper from three academics at Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College, who use a database of college syllabuses from around the English-speaking world to assess how frequently contrasting perspectives on high-profile issues are assigned in college classrooms. One of their examples is Michelle Alexander's 'The New Jim Crow,' a famous and influential but also highly contestable interpretation of mass incarceration and racism in America. In the database, it appears on over 5,000 syllabuses — more than 'Hamlet' or 'The Federalist Papers.' Then the authors look at the most prominent critiques and alternative perspectives on the subject, works by academic authors like James Forman Jr., John Pfaff and Patrick Sharkey. These appear on just a few hundred syllabuses; in an overwhelming majority of cases, 'The New Jim Crow' is assigned alone, without a countervailing perspective. At the same time the leading alternatives are almost never taught alone; they enter the discussion as 'conversation-wideners' but they aren't presented as potential defaults in their own right. So two things seem to happen when college students encounter debates about crime and race and prison. Most of them are given only one perspective: that of Alexander's book and the received wisdom that took shape around its argument. Then a lucky minority are actually taught the controversy — but even there the teaching mechanism gives them to understand that there is an orthodoxy and a heterodoxy, a consensus and critiques, rather than offering a completely different starting place. Obviously a database can't capture what happens in a classroom, where a teacher can introduce debate in discussion as well as through the reading list. And not every text the authors analyze shows as lopsided a result as 'The New Jim Crow'; for instance, they look at Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous pro-choice essay 'A Defense of Abortion' and find more attempts to teach the controversy — mostly because it's almost always assigned in philosophy departments, which (the authors argue) have a stronger commitment to moral debate than other areas of the humanities. But there's still a baseline reality on display here: An academic world that lacks serious political diversity will generate, first, a stultifying degree of conformity on contestable contemporary issues and second, a contrarianism that even at its best still struggles to fully escape the dominant paradigm. For a full escape to be on offer, you would need either a deep shift in human nature or more plausibly, more people involved in the academic project who start from outside its existing orthodoxies. Cultivating contrarianism is healthy; teaching controversies from a neutral standpoint is an important aspiration. But by far the easiest way to give students a sense of the diverse perspectives of the world is just to have people who actually hold those perspectives teaching on your campus. Whether Harvard or any other liberal university can really pull off such a diversification is a different question, suited to a future newsletter. But that these schools would benefit from such a change seems obvious. Arguments carried out exclusively among liberals and leftists can be stimulating, engaging, important, revelatory. But they will always be insufficient to the professed task of the university, the understanding of reality in full. Breviary Derek Thompson on the mystery of the Baby Boom; Lyman Stone responds. Jon Stokes and Julie Fredrickson on being unafraid of artificial intelligence. Seth Benzell on whether A.I. will solve the national debt. Mary Harrington on the strange career of Laura Southern. Andy Beckett on a Nazi in Chile. Steven Spielberg's only perfect movie turns 50.
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
James Ellroy: ‘I have been obsessed with crime since my mother's murder'
James Ellroy is prowling a tiny hat shop in a side street in Seville, Spain. His angular 6ft 3in frame, loud bark and garish Hawaiian shirt draw attention. Everyone watches as he reaches for a khaki green cashmere fedora and tries it on. 'Does it look big?' he drawls, squinting at himself in a mirror. 'Shake your head and see if it moves,' I suggest. He waggles his head: the hat fits but he is still not sure. 'It does not vibrate my vindaloo,' he bellows. 'Let's broom on outta here.' Ellroy, 77, has been vibrating the vindaloo of millions of crime fiction readers for decades, and he is part of his own myth-generating machine. 'I am the greatest popular novelist that America has ever produced,' he declares. 'The author of 24 books, masterpieces all, which precede all my future masterpieces.' He repeats variations of this self-praise multiple times during the week I spend with him in Spain, where he has come to speak at a literary festival. When I ask how he feels about the author Joyce Carol Oates describing him as the American Dostoyevsky, he snorts derisively: 'Dostoyevsky is the Russian Ellroy.' His densely plotted novels, which include 1995's American Tabloid and 2023's The Enchanters, focus on the criminal underbelly of postwar America, especially Los Angeles, and have sold millions of copies. Several, including The Black Dahlia (1987) and most notably LA Confidential (1990), have been adapted into movies. His writing style is a sort of staccato cop rap from a bygone era, sometimes echoed in his own speech. And he has a truly shocking origin story for a crime writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered, her body found in shrubs beside a California high school with one of her stockings tied around her neck. 'I have been obsessed with crime since the hot Sunday afternoon of June 22, 1958, when a policeman named Ward Hallinen squatted down to my little kid level and said, 'Son, your mother has been killed,' ' he says. • James Ellroy calls LA Confidential film 'a 'turkey of the highest form' Ellroy's own life inspires much of his work, which often blurs fact and fiction. At times it seems as though he has walked out of one of his novels. And it's no wonder he wants a convincing hat to wear: the Hat Squad in his books, as any self-respecting Ellroy fan will tell you, comprises four inseparable fedora-wearing robbery detectives who are based on real LAPD officers, known for their tough veneer and compassionate hearts. Which sums up Ellroy too. Despite the braggadocio, he is not insufferable — he veers between extreme self-confidence and a touching unworldliness. 'The world bewilders me,' he says in a moment of self-doubt when we are trying to find our seats on a busy high-speed train to Madrid. He cannot stand crowded places. 'I am only comfortable around a few people.' However, when I interview Ellroy in front of an audience at the Hay Festival Forum in Seville he is more than comfortable, bounding on to the stage and roaring like a lion. Literally. The audience is aghast. 'Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pedants, panty sniffers, punks and pimps,' he snarls in full performance mode. 'I'm James Ellroy, the death dog with the hog log, the foul owl with the death growl and the slick trick with the donkey dick…' On stage it is all swagger and stonewalling. 'I have no view on Donald Trump,' he declares when I ask for his take on the American president. He adds primly: 'I rigorously abstain from moral judgment on the current times.' Yet away from the crowd, one on one, he is much more candid. 'If you want to stray to Trump, I realised very early on that he was, at the very least, a career criminal, mobbed up and very probably a serial sexual harasser. So that should exclude him from the presidency. My cop friends like Trump because Americans have a tough-guy complex. They don't realise how weak and craven he is,' he says. Lee Earle Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948, the only child of 'a great-looking, cheap couple'. His mother, Jean Hilliker, was a nurse and his father, Armand Ellroy, an accountant and, as Ellroy describes him, 'a Hollywood bottom-feeder'. He had no idea how to parent. 'He once said to me, 'Hey kid, I f***ed Rita Hayworth.' I said, 'F*** you, Dad, you did not f*** Rita Hayworth.' Ten years after his death a man who was writing her biography looked me up — my father was her business manager. Did they ever have sexual congress? I'd like to believe they did but my father was a notorious bullshit artist.' Ellroy's parents split up when he was five, and he later moved with his mother to El Monte, just outside LA, spending weekends with his father. Both parents were promiscuous. 'I realised there was a secret adult world out there and that sex is at the heart of it. I saw my mother in bed with men. And later on I came home and found my dad in bed with my sixth-grade teacher. I heard the grunting and groaning as I walked up the steps. What was funny was the dog was trying to take a nap on the bed while all those legs were kicking around.' With the encouragement of his father he grew to hate his mother. When he told her he would prefer to live with his dad, she slapped him. 'I fell and whacked my head on a glass coffee table. She didn't hit me again. She was nothing but solicitous [But] from that point on it was over. It was him and me against her. She was the bad guy.' His mother was murdered on the night of Saturday, June 21, 1958, while Ellroy was staying with his father. Sixty-seven years on, the murder remains unsolved. Only Ellroy could make it even more shocking by saying he was grateful to the killer. 'What I recall most prevalently is forcing myself to cry on the bus going back to LA,' he says. 'I cranked the tears out. I remember waking up the next morning, looking out at a bright blue sky and thinking I had a whole new life. This is not a retrospective,' he insists. 'I'm not concocting this.' In fact his feelings towards his mother are more complex. 'I admired her tremendously. She was capable and competent in a way my father was not.' In his 1996 memoir My Dark Places he admits to having had sexual thoughts about her both before and after her death. Many years later he spent 15 months and a lot of money trying to solve her murder with Bill Stoner, a retired homicide detective. Stoner later said he thought Ellroy was 'falling in love with his mother'. Not quite, Ellroy says today, but 'I am of her'. Living with his permissive father was not all he had hoped it might be. The apartment was filthy and meals were erratic. It was a 'horrible, horrible childhood', he says, but he cautions against pity. 'I'm not some crack baby butt-f***ed in his crib by his Uncle Charlie.' A voracious reader, he gravitated towards crime books after his mother's murder. He was expelled from school for fighting and truancy as a teenager, then stayed at home to care for his father, who had suffered a stroke. Eventually he could stand it no more and in 1965 he briefly joined the army to escape — something for which he has never quite forgiven himself. 'I used to dream about the abandonment of my father when he was dying,' he says. He returned from the army just before his father's death later that year. 'His final words to me were, 'Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.' ' Ellroy — who adopted the name James because he hated the 'tongue-tripping l's and e's' of Lee Earle Ellroy — hit a precarious decade. Often homeless, he would sleep in parks, could not hold down a job and sank into alcoholism. He was arrested multiple times: 'I used to shoplift. I used to break into houses and sniff women's undergarments, I stole a few cars — Mickey Mouse misdemeanours. I probably got arrested forty times but [on] aggregate I served no more than four or five months of county jail time.' His determination to write lifted him out of this spiral. In 1977 he took a job as a golf caddie at the Bel-Air Country Club outside LA and started his first novel, Brown's Requiem, about a caddy who hires a detective to spy on his sister. Murder and mayhem ensue, interwoven with a love story. 'All my books are love stories set against violent backdrops,' he says. 'If there are two great themes in my books it's history as a state of yearning and bad men in love with strong women.' His most recent book, The Enchanters, published in 2023, features a real-life Hollywood private eye, Freddy Otash, spying on Marilyn Monroe to get dirt on the Kennedys. Describing Monroe as 'talentless and usurious', Ellroy conjures a murky world of corrupt politicians and craven stars and looks on with his readers, enthralled and titillated, as they tear each other apart. 'Absolute factual reality means nothing to me,' he stresses. 'What I do is I slander the dead.' • The Enchanters by James Ellroy review — he's a one-off The police in his novels are often as corrupt as the criminals. 'I love the cops. It started when a policeman put a nickel in a vending machine and handed me a candy bar the afternoon [after] my mother was killed. He gave me a little pat on the head and I have given my heart to cops ever since. I don't care what kind of outré illegal shit they pull, I take gleeful joy in describing police misconduct. Rogue cops are my guys.' Would he ever have contemplated becoming a cop himself? 'Naaah,' he growls. What about a criminal? Has he ever fantasised about murdering someone? He narrows his eyes and for a moment I wonder if I have overstepped the mark. But his face softens into a smile: 'No, I never have.' Ellroy has been married and divorced twice — first to Mary Doherty, a phone company executive, from 1988 to 1991. These days he lives in Denver with his second ex-wife, the Canadian author Helen Knode, whom he met in 1990 when his marriage to Doherty was crumbling. 'She's the single most brilliant human being I've ever met,' he says of Knode. They married in October 1991, but their relationship became tumultuous: Ellroy was tackling addiction and mental health problems. They now live in the same building but in different apartments. 'I have a key to hers, she has a key to mine. It's not monogamy that's the problem, it's cohabitation. We can fight a fight. She gets shrill real quick. Helen would believe she is remarkably more open-minded than me. I would say I'm remarkably more open-minded than her… Tell her I said that. She will bray like a horse.' A few days later I speak to Knode on the phone. She splutters indignantly when I tell her what Ellroy said. How does she put up with him? 'It's breathtakingly exhausting to be him and to be around him,' she says affectionately. 'There are several James Ellroys and they all cohabit sometimes.' He has never had children, saying in the past he feared he would be a 'bad father'. 'I have absolutely no feeling for families,' he tells me. He and Knode experimented with an open marriage but by 2005 they had agreed to split. 'It was the best day of my life when I realised I could divorce him,' Knode says with a laugh. Ellroy then had a series of relationships with, as Knode puts it, 'parasitical women' — but they remained close. During his last relationship, more than a decade ago, his girlfriend complained about the amount of time he spent talking to Knode on the phone. 'She said, 'Her or me?' I said, 'Her.' We've been together ever since,' Ellroy says. They usually spend the late afternoon together at Knode's apartment, have 'dinch' (lunch/dinner) and watch a documentary or an old movie. 'I've had to put my foot down,' she says. 'I told him we're not watching any movies with guns.' 'Then we say goodnight,' Ellroy says, 'and I go back to my apartment. I have insomnia, so I'm padding around.' Ellroy's flat is austere with grey walls, overlooking a railway track. 'It's reassuring. Trains going by at two and three o'clock in the morning.' The bookshelves are filled with copies of his own books. He rarely goes out. 'Helen has friends, I don't. I actually have panic attacks if Helen stays out too late.' He spends most of the day at home, writing and listening to classical music, especially Beethoven. 'I write by hand, I've never logged on to a computer. I believe the internet, computers, cell phones, apps, electronic devices are the most pernicious version of Satan on earth. Get a gun and shoot your computer through its evil digital heart. In its guise of convenience it has destroyed civility and turned younger people into uncivil, brusque, rude, low-attention-span, shithead kids and we have to rescue future generations from this evil.' He will never write a novel set in the present — or even in the last half century: 'In 1972 Watergate eats up the political scenery. There's no place to go after that.' He knows his political history but very little about the world today. He admired Margaret Thatcher as 'the saviour of Britain' (he even named a dog after her), but when I ask what he thinks of Keir Starmer, he replies, 'Who?' Ellroy has almost finished writing his next novel, set in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis but spanning back to include the bombing of Guernica. He has never seen Picasso's Guernica painting of 1937, so we arrange to meet one afternoon at the Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid. He stands silently in front of the huge monochrome oil painting for a full ten minutes, scanning every detail, before making the sign of the cross. 'It's horrifying,' he says quietly. In the next room, though, he is back in ebullient mode. Catching sight of Salvador Dalí's 1929 painting The Great Masturbator, he chuckles. 'Wanker!' he says loudly. There is something restless about Ellroy, both physically — loping around, fidgeting — and in spirit. 'I want to get lost,' he says repeatedly. 'I gotta get outside of myself. I wrestle with it all the time.' What does he mean? 'I'm always thinking. I can't sleep for shit. I just want to go to a place where nobody knows me and have one double Manhattan, or eat a marijuana cookie, and just see what happens.' But he won't let himself. He has been teetotal for years and during his sleepless nights he worries about everything, death above all. 'Horror of death is the tremor that lies beneath everything. And 77 will get you there.' He has thought carefully about how he would like to be buried. 'I want to have my briefcase and my three stuffed alligators.' He's not joking — but they are fluffy toys rather than taxidermy. 'Sometimes I'll put the gators under the covers with me, they're a family. Al is the alligator, of course. Wife is named Clara and they have a daughter named Gertie. They're going in the hole with me.' Not that he is winding down. 'I'm not checking out of here any time soon.' Indeed he often says that he will live until he's 101. 'I've got a lot of books left in me. I'm going to have a strong third act. Not to labour a point, but I am a genius.' Hay Festival Segovia runs Sep 11-14 and Hay Forum Seville Feb 11-14, 2026;
New York Times
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Prep School Predator Haunts Joyce Carol Oates's New Novel
FOX, by Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates's impressive and unsettling new novel, 'Fox,' concerns the far-reaching damage unleashed by a self-serving sociopath. Francis Harlan Fox, a predatory English teacher at an elite boarding school in southern New Jersey, uses his authority to sexually abuse his adolescent female students, and manipulates everyone around him — his few friends, parents, the school headmistress, the legal system — to create cover. His galactic indifference to other people's suffering is horrifying yet remarkably engrossing. When an unidentified corpse, torn apart by animals, is discovered in Fox's car at the bottom of a ravine, the mystery provides a narrative throughline that Oates expertly uses to toggle back and forth between the past and present. It won't be long before most readers will find themselves hoping that the unlucky party is Fox, and even wish that he could have died more than once. 'Lolita' casts a long shadow over this book. Fox's office neighbor is named Quilty, and Fox himself, protesting too much, is an outspoken hater of Nabokov's novel. The attention given to the perspectives of Fox's victims can be seen as a rejoinder to Humbert Humbert's narrative monopoly in 'Lolita.' One of these victims, Mary Ann Healy, is a scholarship student with a rough family life, and the portrait that Oates draws of her is particularly affecting. After entering puberty at an early age, Mary Ann finds herself bewilderingly and crushingly ostracized by male relatives, bullied by schoolmates and admonished by her fearful mother. 'Freak! Freaky! — Dirty girl,' she's told. 'In dreams as in actual life she heard these words which were sometimes taunts, sometimes accusations, sometimes uttered in vehement disgust but sometimes, which frightened most, in a kind of reluctant and resentful awe.' She is exactly the sort of student who desperately needs a safe, nurturing influence. Instead, she gets Mr. Fox. Mary Ann becomes conspicuously infatuated with him, but Fox, seeing her more as a threat to his cover than potential quarry, shuns her and sends her spiraling out of school and out of town altogether. Hauntingly, the novel does not resolve her fate. Oates is (and I write this as a fan) not known for her moderation, so her restraint here is notable. She leaves it to the reader's imagination to consider Mary Ann's future, though it's hard to be optimistic about her chances. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
