In Joyce Carol Oates' luridly seductive ‘Fox,' a pedophile teacher ends up dead

Los Angeles Times

6 hours ago

'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.