Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, Fox, offers a prolonged dive into the murkiest of waters. Told by way of a chronology that is sometimes challengingly fractured, it follows the dreadful career of a literature teacher named Francis Harlan Fox at the elite Langhorne Academy in South Jersey.
Fox appears to be charismatic, well liked and good at his job. His classes frequently end in applause, his students are devoted to him and he is described as “handsome in the clean-shaven way of the British actor Hugh Grant”. Yet he is almost nothing like his outward appearance suggests. He is at all times a man playing a part, and from the worst of motives.
Originally called Frank Farrell (before he legally changed his name), Fox is a predatory paedophile who uses the teaching profession to secure access to young victims. Much of this is discovered only after the book’s initial fifty pages, which detail, from multiple points of view, the discovery of a body in a waterlogged nature reserve not far from the school.
That this should turn out to be the corpse of Fox himself comes as no surprise, and it is not treated as such; rather, it is unfolded for us in a tone of grisly inevitability. Although Fox shares some common ground with the psychological thriller, it is not a novel of twists and shocks, but rather of events laid out through a variety of first-person and close-third-person perspectives. It is grim, unstinting work, and none of the characters, even the best of them – the dogged cops investigating the crime; the naive librarian who believes she has a quasi-romantic connection with Fox; the father of one of Fox’s victims, who has sexual secrets of his own – escapes Oates’s searching eye.
The author reserves most of her ire for Fox himself, to whom she accords none of the residual glamour with which literary monsters are often garlanded (Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, for example, or even Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Lolita being a text that is much referenced here). Instead, Fox is a wretched little man, a snake in the grass in the grip of a compulsion from which he doesn’t even really try to wriggle free. The glimpses we are given into his psyche are generally stomach-churning: “teaching middle school was not unlike grazing a buffet of exquisite foods hidden among plebeian, coarse, and unappetizing ones”.
Oates makes her opinion of her subject clear throughout – a scene in which Fox sends away a young prostitute for looking too old is memorably grotesque – and she submits his corpse to a variety of gothic indignities. At one point, his severed tongue (“the bloodied meat-thing”) is discovered in the mouth of his boss’s pet dog. Later, the remnants of a toe are found.
The man who investigates the teacher’s homicide is led to reflect that “any longtime law enforcement officer understands that there are individuals so loathsome, they deserve being murdered”, while a final, posthumous glimpse of Fox’s bedroom confirms the kind of person he really is: “in a man’s private quarters it’s the condition of a venetian blind, or the stale-sour smell of his bedding, or the contents of his personal computer that most reveal his soul”. Fox is a bleak, relentless story, with something of the atmosphere of the television series True Detective. It is also vastly overlong.
Now eighty-six and the author of some sixty novels (without counting those written under pseudonyms), Joyce Carol Oates has arguably earned the right to write to whatever length she chooses, but at 650 pages, this latest book veers into excess. The constantly shifting timeline lends it a woozy, rambling quality and there are frequent repetitions of words, phrases, images, ideas. Fox is a dark place in which to spend the amount of time that its writer demands of us, and one finishes it with some relief, suspecting that a terser, leaner approach would have been a good deal more effective.
J. S. Barnes’s new novel, Frankenstein’s Monster, will be published in September.
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