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Hamilton Spectator
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- 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.
Los Angeles Times
16-06-2025
- Los Angeles Times
In Joyce Carol Oates' luridly seductive ‘Fox,' a pedophile teacher ends up dead
'Fox' opens in October of 2013 with the grisly discovery of a wrecked white Acura and a dismembered body at the bottom of a South Jersey ravine. Joyce Carol Oates calmly winds the mystery backward through the repulsive actions of the deceased before he meets an untimely death, building fear alongside fascination before she finally reveals how he came to his end — and at whose hand. Francis Fox, pedophile, is a smug, deceitful middle school English teacher, practiced in the art of seduction and the rewards and punishment psychology of B.F. Skinner. Fox has been moving from school to school for years, disguising his identity to escape the consequences of his actions. When he vanishes from the Langhorne Academy and his disappearance is investigated by Det. Horace Zwender, there is no dearth of likely suspects: He has wronged everyone from his college girlfriend to the academy's headmistress; he has abused girls at multiple schools. He's lied to everyone, and nobody truly knows him. 'Fox' has the bones of a potboiler but is supported by the sinew of the author's elegant structure and syntax. She draws on natural imagery and a haunting sense of the macabre, castigating the reader's too-easy assumptions. The book incorporates a delightfully complicated, interwoven cast of characters in small-town New Jersey; elements of class, gentrification and divided families create opportunity for misunderstanding and misdirection. The novel is a whodunit, but to reduce it entirely to that distinction would be inaccurate. Like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's 'Lolita,' which Oates' protagonist references and dismisses frequently, Fox's story is inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling. As Nabokov wrote of his own novel, it lacks a moral, and a moral center. That's not the point, though. Oates understands, as always, how to keep us on the hook. Discussions of Fox's likability are also moot: He's repulsive and unreliable, a monster. His graphic, dehumanizing actions are meant to turn stomachs. He's a known liar. The author carefully reveals the story of Fox's fate, circling the Wieland wetlands ravine again and again. There are any number of sympathetic suspects, or perhaps an easy, less disturbing explanation. One thing is clear: Almost every character believes that Francis Fox deserved to die. There are hard lines of propriety between Fox and the rest of the world, and despite — or perhaps because of — that, Oates makes plain that seduction, narrative and instruction each entail the exercise of power. When the teacher, typically a loner, learns that other faculty members 'encounter maddening students … whom, however hard they try, they can't seduce,' he muses: 'Seduce is not the word. No. Can't reach is the preferable term.' Oates leads us through Fox's lurid world, drawing deliberately uncomfortable parallels between his calculated actions and the work of novelists and teachers, each of whom must also use enticement and enchantment to reach their mark. Her dark protagonist is highly educated, allowing him to deftly anticipate the actions of his potential victims and accusers. The DNA of 'Fox' is thus in art and literature: Francis Fox uses both to develop his outer and inner life. Fox imagines his girls as Balthusian waifs, attracting him with a distracted air of seduction. He obsessively disdains 'Lolita,' remarking often on the impractical physicality of Humbert's sexual relationship; in doing so, he reveals his unhealthy fixations and predilections. 'Fox' similarly explores Edgar Allan Poe's life. Poe is credited with writing the first American detective story, and Oates writes in the same vein. But Fox is fixated on Poe's dead-girl literature and his real-life marriage to a child bride. Oates seems to posit that we allow whatever entertains, and we return to whatever has entertained before. She picks at the American lionization of our creative heroes, especially those with asterisks next to their names because they've abused young women. That society allows such men to become heroes is as troubling as her protagonist's actions. It appears that she wants us to indict us, too. Fox calls himself alternately 'Mr. Tongue' or 'Big Teddy Bear' when he brings his eager seventh-grade charges to his basement office to snuggle, kiss and photograph, luring them there with the promise of comments on their writing and drugging them with benzo-laced treats. 'It was his strategy,' Oates writes, 'as soon as possible in a new term, to determine which girls, if they were attractive, were fatherless. For a fatherless girl is an exquisite rose on a branch lacking thorns, there for the picking.' The lurid scenes where Fox abuses students like Genevieve, his favorite 'Little Kitten,' in his locked office are vile. Yet in addition to fitting the stereotypical profile of a pedophile, he also wields abusive and cold-blooded coercion in the classroom. Following the 'principle of intermittent reinforcement, in which an experimental subject is rewarded for their effort not continuously, or predictably, but intermittently, or unpredictably,' he grades 'in a way designed to shatter her defenses: it will be impossible for her not to feel relief, gratitude, some measure of happiness when her grade improves, thus she will be conditioned to seek a higher grade.' This is a chilling reminder that artistic mentors can be abusive in many different ways. Francis Fox torments his pupils at every level, using calculated psychology to entice and to destroy. 'Fox' hauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art. Oates presents the idea of malignant artistic inspiration. One of Fox's charges keeps his darkest secrets in a 'Mystery-Journal.' The mystery of Fox's death gets resolved, yet Oates doesn't end there: Her ending changes who has the power. Twisted expectation and manipulated attention are both hallmarks of artistic creation. In the wrong hands — like Francis Fox's — they're instruments of torture. In the author's, they're tools. The allusive nature of 'Fox' and its twist ending shows how greatness that comes from awfulness can be inconveniently, unquestioningly good. What do we do with the idea that the worst offenses can also sometimes create art? Readers, consumers and audiences haven't yet come to peace with that, just like we haven't come to terms with how to separate art from a monstrous artist. Oates wants us to turn pages and squirm. Partington is a teacher in Elk Grove and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
