If you consume too much true crime it starts to infect your routine. Let your dog off the leash in any lonely overgrown place and you’ll start to worry she’ll come bounding out of the undergrowth with a body part in tow. Maybe that’s my personal fear, but Joyce Carol Oates taps straight into it with the gripping, disgusting and darkly comic opening to her latest novel, Fox.
Uptight spinster headmistress P Cady lets her rescue hound Princess Di run riot around a New Jersey nature reserve, only for the mutt to return with a human tongue clamped in her jaws. Soon a body, or pieces of it, is discovered, and the charming young English teacher at the fancy Langhorne Academy is missing.
The students of the dead Mr Fox are devastated, holding vigils and falling into a mass hysteria of ghost sightings and fainting fits. One 12-year-old girl attempts to take her own life. But Mr Fox is not what he seems, and that tongue chewed on by Princess Di — Mr Tongue, as he calls his rapacious organ — has done terrible things in the most taboo of places.
Usually a literary thriller that prioritises the thoughts and emotions of the victim, rather than foregrounding the killer’s depravity, would be seen as more noble. But Oates flips the genre on its head, insisting the reader spend an almost inordinate time in the mind of her paedophile protagonist.
The whodunnit is interesting enough, but it is the depravity that becomes almost propulsive. The reader becomes the detective, attempting to plumb the degenerate psyche of the — potential — murder victim.
Grooming targets
Fox is a canny portrait of a predator. His targets are specific — girls aged 12 to 13 with an air of a “dreamy Balthus prepubescent”. Here Oates impishly pokes the hornet’s nest of debate over the tastefulness of serious galleries displaying the painter’s erotic portraits of girls. But everyone Fox encounters is a target of his grooming.
He takes pains to win over every student, and maintains a harem of adult women to cloak him in respectability. Fox also deceives himself. He dismisses Nabokov’s Lolita as “boring, pretentious, offensive”. Yet his modus operandi is somehow more disgusting than anything Humbert Humbert got up to. There are no trigger warnings with this book, but beware of graphic descriptions of the production of child sexual abuse material.
The text is haunted by the voices of the girls and their undying love for their dead abuser
There are chapters in other voices too, some from Fox’s rarefied orbit such as P Cady, and the father of Eunice Pfenning, a potential victim of Fox. There are people from the town too, such as Demetrius Healy, the sweet religious high-school dropout who finds the body, while class tensions simmers beneath detective H Zwender’s investigation. The text is haunted, too, by the voices of the girls and their undying love for their dead abuser. Oates’s looping style and deliberate repetitions lull the reader, but beware, no one is a reliable narrator in Fox.
Oates, 87, is unflinching. This is the woman who published an essay in The New York Times in 1981 that was titled, to address her critics, Why is Your Writing So Violent? Her 2022 novel Babysitter revolved around the character of a housewife who enthusiastically submits to repeated violent rapes. She has made a career of elevating true crime to literary and award-winning heights with more than 60 novels. If you thought she was just the older lady with good posting game on X, you’re missing out.
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Fox is a classic of her genre, but if you’re looking for a beefy beach read to pack for your holidays, beware. It’s 650 pages of nightmare fuel that will put you off your all-inclusive beverages. I have had to stop calling my partner by a pet name, it became so stomach-turning on the page.
But this is also an endorsement — Fox is a book that will stay with you for a long time. Not least because it has a devious rug-pull of an epilogue that will make you want to start the whole book over again.
India Block is a columnist for The London Standard
Fox by Joyce Carol Oates is out now (HarperCollins, £18.99)
