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.
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