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.
The nearly universal blindness of adults is one of Oates’s key themes. Fox’s oldest friend, a besotted heiress, overlooks his history of plagiarism and doesn’t question the circumstances under which he has lost previous jobs, or question his decision to change his name. The parent of a student whom Fox torments with arbitrary bad grades — primarily because he doesn’t like her face — complacently accepts the teacher’s version of the situation. The school’s vain headmistress is dazzled by Fox’s calculated enthusiasm for her collection of landscape paintings.
A testy police detective named Horace Zwender provides a little light in the novel’s latter sections. He’s an erratic hero, chronically and counterproductively resentful of his partner, and his tough job is made easier by a fair amount of luck. But his findings do nothing to help the vanished Mary Ann, or any of the other girls who have been exploited and traumatized by the teacher. The gaping absence of community responsibility is profound.
This novel isn’t the first Oates has written about a ghoul in human disguise. Its themes are not dissimilar from those in “Zombie” (1995), a novel inspired by the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer whose depraved acts included crude brain surgeries on victims to keep them alive and in his control. “Zombie” remains shocking, a nausea-inducing nightmare masterpiece that details its murderer’s crimes with unsparing specificity. As with “Fox,” it invites questions about the environment that has both nurtured such an individual and failed to recognize him.
In a review of “Zombie” for this publication nearly 30 years ago, the critic Steven Marcus didn’t feel that Oates’s indictment was warranted. “But to go on and imply that America today is functionally the social equivalent or cultural analogue of a psychotic monster and serial murderer is to make an unsupportable allegorical suggestion,” Marcus wrote. “Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s gulag were societies that were largely dominated by homicidal, monstrous and indeed psychotic practices and justifications. America today, for all the violence and brutality we have come both to fear and sometimes to deny, has not quite yet descended into collective madness.” I wonder how he’d feel now.
FOX | By Joyce Carol Oates | Hogarth | 649 pp. | $32
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