BookBrowse Reviews Fox by Joyce Carol Oates

BookBrowse:

While it is by no means an easy read, Joyce Carol Oates' Fox is an absorbing murder mystery and an unsparing portrait of evil.

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An Acura is found half-submerged in the wetlands of southern New Jersey; inside is the animal-eaten corpse of Francis Fox, an English teacher at Langhorne Academy, an elite boarding school in the fictional township of Wieland. Fox was handsome, charismatic, and nurturing towards (some of) his students; he was also a manipulative pedophile, plying his favorite pupils with drug-laced treats and molesting them in his office. As his death sends shockwaves through the community, Fox haunts every single character, from the detective investigating his murder to the headmistress who unknowingly hired a sexual predator—to say nothing of his victims.

Fox hops from perspective to perspective, allowing us to get to know a broad ensemble as the narrative jumps back and forth through time. There's pharmaceutical executive Martin Pfenning and his autistic daughter Eunice, with whom he has a strained relationship; there are the Healys, a dysfunctional "poor white" family who struggle to make a living in a rapidly gentrifying Wieland; there's Paige Cady, Langhorne's headmistress, whose icy, WASPish demeanor belies a writhing mass of neuroses.

And, of course, there is Fox himself, one of the most odious characters you're likely to meet for a very long time. A cross between Humbert Humbert and Tom Ripley, Fox is a well-educated con artist who idealizes the young female form—he's fixated on the prepubescent nudes of the French painter Balthus, as well as Edgar Allan Poe's marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm (see Beyond the Book). When he's with his victims, he refers to himself sometimes as Big Teddy Bear, and other times as Mr. Tongue.

What makes Fox's passages illuminating rather than gratuitously ugly is how clearly Oates sees him as the pathetic wretch he is. When we watch Fox connive his way into the tony confines of Langhorne Academy, we receive no vicarious, Ripley-esque pleasure from the process—only frustration and disgust at the naivete of people who should know better. His inner monologue alternates between maudlin self-pity ("my heart is in tatters, my life is in ruins"), delusional infatuation (like his endless cooing over his "little kittens"), and sneering cruelty, directed especially at young Eunice Pfenning. He relishes how he can manipulate his students by granting or withholding praise and good grades, describing himself as a "puppet-master"—as though we're supposed to be impressed by how skillfully he can emotionally abuse a bunch of twelve-year-olds.

It should come as no surprise that Oates, the author of novels like Blonde and Zombie, goes to some very dark places here. There are passages describing Fox's abuse, both from his point of view and that of his favorite victim, which will paralyze you with hatred and despair. And his evil, dangerous behavior is not limited to sexual abuse: his treatment of Mary Ann Healy, a troubled girl whom Fox nurtures then spurns, and Eunice Pfenning, whom Fox goes out of his way to torment, is just as upsetting.

Fox will not be a book for everyone. Oates has many virtues as a writer—her gothic sensibility, her gift for evocative imagery, her fearlessness to go where others won't dare—but restraint is not among them. (For the most part, anyway—the fates of at least a few characters are left hauntingly unresolved.) Even those who can stomach the subject matter may find Fox exhausting. But if you're on Oates' wavelength, you will be richly rewarded with a dense, twisty mystery that is unafraid to gaze into the void.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2025, and has been updated for the June 2026 edition. Click here to go to this issue.