Hogarth
Review by Walter Cummins
I hadn’t read a Joyce Carol Oates’ novel in years, an avoidance I can attribute to intimidation ny her output, which I believe is fifty-eight novels, not to mention story collections, literary criticism, and more. Where to begin? How to get a handle on her oeuvre? I took the easy way out and just picked her most recent novel, Fox, all 672 pages of it.
Fox is a murder mystery. It’s primary setting is an exclusive and expensive private school—Langhorne Academy—near both a nature reserve in south Jersey and the surrounding community—Wieland Township, a mix of rundown old houses and McMansions for the new corporate executive class. In a sense, it’s a version of an inbred Miss Marple village but spread out over much more acreage, in that a body—this one ravaged by turkey vultures and other creatures—is discovered with the likely murderer a suspect from the local community, each possible guilty one examined in detail.
As with a Miss Marple story, the murder victim is an unlikeable character the reader isn’t sorry to see dead. Especially in this novel because the title figure, Francis Fox, is an extremely hateful human being. This attractive and outwardly amiable man, a Langhorne teacher, is actually a pederast predator of pubescent seventh-graders. Although the reader and the few law enforcement figures who know of Fox’s predilections despise him, the many characters who do not know fail to suspect the truth, including the adoring Langhorne students who tearfully mourn his loss. While Miss Marple is cleverly lighthearted in solving a puzzle, Oates has written a much darker novel that explores human degradation and human frailties. While her narrative is compelling in dramatizing the procedural steps in coming to a solution that, finally, only readers know, the real subject of the novel is an exploration of human evil and the failure to acknowledge it.
Fox himself hardly considers his violation of the girls he singles out as his “kittens” as a source of guilt and shame. Although he uses and abuses, he believes the fact that he has chosen them for special treatment is some sort of gift, elevating them over their classmates when bestowing his kisses and caresses. And perhaps worst is the fact that the girls themselves consider his ruining of their lives an expression of eternal love. They certainly believe that it is and in their delusion that they love him back, a love that is a form of desperation. The prologue of the novel begins with this sentence: “There was never a time when I was not in love with Mr. Fox.” Fox has told them, “My darling there will never be a time when our souls are not joined.” Each of the nymphets in Fox’s life serves as a new source of this obsession as she becomes one of the children he has seduced, in soul as well at body.
And it’s not just adolescent girls Fox has possessed. In a different sort of seduction he has led adult women to fixate on and even love him. It’s not just that he is handsome, witty, and charming in the false persona he enacts, it’s also that he finds needy women desperate for affection easy prey. He calls several of them soulmates, and despite their sexless relationships, they cling to him emotionally, in some cases hoping he will eventually marry them. Even after his death and still ignorant of his violations, they continue to revere him, one establishing a Francis Fox scholarship at Langhorne while the Academy creates additional testimonials to his memory. But a few people, the handful that know the truth of his crimes, are shaken by being deluded by a man who never was what they believed.
The central question for the success of Oates’ novel is whether readers believe a man like Francis Fox could have existed and gotten away with it. Perhaps it’s because I was so repelled by Fox, I found his almost absolute control over others only a metaphor for the extremes of human malevolence and gullibility. I realize that real people have gotten away with abuse for decades before they were finally exposed. But I find Fox excessive as depicted in this novel.
I also find Oates’ application one of her strongest talents—the ability to capture and convey what people are thinking during the crises of their lives—overdone. She can convincingly capture what a lovesick child—Little Kitten Genevieve—feels about Mr. Tongue’s probing her mouth, his hands on his body. Fox in his contemplations explains what it feels like to be attracted by a beautiful female child and also his ability to deceive adults. Oates can enter the minds of all the central characters and a few minor, but—and this is a problem—excessively and redundantly. The first time around or not requiring such length, she makes the crucial point about these people, in part because a number of them are predictable in their thinking, so that the detail with which they are revealed is unnecessary. The novel could tell its story in many fewer pages.
Yet the many scenes that capture the tension of character clashes reveal the special skill Oates possesses and the reason she has achieved so many successes during her career.
