Fox, by Joyce Carol Oates, is a mesmerizing tale. Not unlike the titular character himself.
Set in an upscale boarding school incongruously located hard by New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, Oates has infused her story with a miasma of disgust, recursively weaving her way among a pedophile’s inner life, the tenuous lives of locals, and a meandering police investigation.
Oates opens with three sets of visitors to a nature preserve, Weiland Waterlands, named after the small town which centers her action. First, P. (Paige) Cady, the single fifty year-old headmistress of The Langhorne Academy, and her rescue pup, a hound-terrier mix named Princess Di, discover what Cady presumes to be the tongue of a deer which she thinks might have been torn loose by the turkey vultures circling overhead. The next day, Eugenia Pfennig, a 13 year-old eight-grader at the Academy, and her Daddy, see the same vultures, but only discover the head of an abandoned life-sized doll in the rushes at the edge of the swamp. Their visit is an attempt by Daddy to bond with his brilliant but sullen daughter who is only interested in securing scenes of nature to draw and describe, as requested by her English teacher, Francis Fox. On the third day, Halloween, Marcus and Demetrius Healy, after delivering scrap lumber to the nearby dump, follow the vultures to a white Acura sedan half submerged in the stagnate water at the base of a thirty-foot drop-off. They finally discover the badly picked over corpse which has excited the vultures.
So far, we’re thirty-five pages into an appropriately gruesome and atmospheric whodunit. Oates has teased us with just enough information to set up her introduction of Francis Fox, the newly arrived English teacher. Immediately she enters his perverted thoughts as he seduces what might be one of his twelve year-old “girl-students”. Helpfully dated flashbacks fill in his journey from a Columbia Masters program in literature to meticulous self-loathing predator. We soon learn the white Acura is his and he is missing following the Fall break. So the chase begins.
But what a slow-motion chase it is. Oates repeats the thoughts and actions of many characters, at times word-for-word. Scenes are replayed from different characters’ viewpoints. And her narration periodically hammers home the horror of Fox’s predilections, the anxiety of P. Cady’s carefully constructed personal and professional life, the domestic disruptions of several Langhorne sets of parents, and the difficulties of the residents of the Pine Barrens simply trying to live day-to-day.
Eventually, Oates begrudgingly returns to her murder mystery (or was it murder?) through H. (Horace) Zwender, a divorced and very human detective on the 8-man Weiland police force. Despite everyone’s interest in labeling Fox’s death a suicide or accident, he doggedly pursues the more difficult possibility that someone killed him. After many false leads, red herrings, and wandering interviews with most of the town and school population, the answer falls into his lap. Zwender ties up the case in a neat bow, leaving everyone with only the private and imperfect knowledge each has.
Not satisfied with the pat answers she’s provided, Oates ends with an epilogue dated nine years after the events in Jersey in the fall of 2013, where she supplies a final resolution.