What if a man, much lauded in his community, isn’t who he proclaims himself to be? What if the stories we tell ourselves, even within the privacy of our own minds, are laced with falsehoods?
So begins the premise of Fox, the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Joyce Carol Oates. The book opens with the discovery of a dead Francis Fox, a much beloved middle school English teacher, in the rural community of Weiland, New Jersey.
Fox’s body is found in his car, partially dismembered by carrion birds, at the bottom of a ravine in the Pine Barrens wilderness. Immediately there is speculation amongst the community: a drunken accident? A suicide? But as the novel unfolds, a darker story emerges. Fox used his post as an elite prep school teacher to abuse many of his female students and his death wasn’t an accident; it was a murder.
The novel, Oates’s first attempt at a classical whodunnit, is told in close-third, through multiple viewpoints. There’s Fox himself; P. Cady, the supercilious headmistress of the Langhorne Academy, where Fox was a teacher; Martin Pfenning, the hapless father of a Langhorne student; Demetrius Healy, a working class man who assists his father, one of Langhorne’s janitors; Detective Zwender of the Weiland PD; and of course, the voices of a few of Fox’s female students: Mary Ann Healy and Eunice Pfenning.
The strategy allows Oates to circle the central crime, highlighting various character’s unreliability and the falsehoods they tell to protect their own reputations. Fox and others repeatedly incriminate themselves and it is shocking how even those most appalled by his actions eagerly cover up his crimes. It also gives voice to the victims of Fox’s predation, something Lolita, perhaps the most famous example of a novel about a pedophile, fails to do.
Oates and I corresponded via email this July and discussed how communities can enable predators, the novel’s multiple points-of-view, and how the limits of official records and histories are ripe for interrogation.
Courtney DuChene: I was struck by the failures of the adults in the novel. They fail to identify the predator in their midst, but more than that, they seem to protect him even when confronted with evidence of his crimes. What made you want to examine not just a predator, but the community that upholds him?
Joyce Carol Oates: The phenomenon of predatory behavior is usually only possible through “enablers”—a fact that seems to have been only really discovered and discussed in recent decades.
Usually, a sexual predator or serial killer has been envisioned as a loner—a “lone wolf”—without a family or friends; but that is actually mistaken in many or most cases. There are apparently “normal” family men who have secret lives as predators—their wives, partners, or relatives may be vaguely aware that something is not right, but they have no wish to investigate. Incest within a family is often linked to the same phenomenon: denial, complicity.
The phenomenon of predatory behavior is usually only possible through ‘enablers.’
This is not a matter of “low-information” persons; it can be found in presumably highly educated families, as in the startling/shocking case of Alice Munro in longtime denial of her own young child’s abuse at the hands of Munro’s second husband.
CD: How did writing the novel in close third, from multiple points of view, help you convey the charismatic effect Fox had on the community, which allowed him to get away with his abuse?
JCO: For me, the challenge and excitement of writing is dramatization: showing how a story unfolds, how people interact, not merely summarizing scenes or alluding to behavior. It is always my intention to bring readers into a scene in a kind of deep immersion. Each character has his/her specific language, subtly differing from the others.
Francis Fox is the most ironically “aware”—“alert”—of all the characters because he is the predator; like a fox, he has to stay ahead of others’ knowledge of him; he is just naturally more cunning. (Not more “intelligent”: “cunning.”)
CD: Many of the women in the novel are charmed by Francis Fox, but other characters, men in particular, seem corrupted by him, drawn into his world and succumbing to dark thoughts. Can you speak to this dynamic?
JCO: In a community, some individuals are just naturally more popular, more “charismatic” than others. Because Fox is a Skinnerian [a follower of psychologist B.F. Skinner], he understands how readily people can be conditioned, even or especially intelligent persons who trust their own “instinct”— not knowing that they are being manipulated.
It is true, I was definitely thinking of our political situation in which political leaders lie, exaggerate, and misinform multitudes, but are so persuasive, telling some part of the populace what they want to know, that they are rarely repudiated; in fact, their admirers become fanatically attached to defending them. However, Fox is set in 2013, before our current era.
Fox is based upon a specific individual, a middle-school teacher who groomed his vulnerable girl-students for many years; he was exposed but never punished. The character of Francis Fox himself is fictitious; it is the behavior, the acts, of this person that resemble Fox’s behavior. (I often write about behavior, specific acts and events; but rarely write about actual people. Even my Norma Jeane Baker, in Blonde, is 99 percent invented.)
CD: Francis Fox’s voice is enthralling—it has an ethereal, timeless quality, while also being clearly unreliable. There’s echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, and they both make references to Edgar Allen Poe and Lewis Carroll, though Fox repeatedly disavows Lolita. How do you see the two texts, Fox and Lolita, as being in conversation with one another?
JCO: Fox is especially enthralled by the dreamlike portraits of Bathus, and by the dreamy wraith-like figures of E.A. Poe, rather than the less ethereal figure of Lolita. The girl in Nabokov’s novel is only 12 initially, really a child; while Fox’s “Kittens” are prepubescents, just a few years older. Though it may not seem significant to a normal person, there is a considerable difference.
As Fox observes, most girls that age are “shy” around men, not fearless and bantering.
Odd events in American history often raise more questions than can be answered.
Where Humbert Humbert is the sole narrator of Lolita, definitely I wanted girls and women to have their voices as distinct as Fox’s; plus other points of view. Lolita is just a single voice, basically in its rhythms and puns it is Nabokov’s voice, and Humbert Humbert is his mask. But in Fox, Fox’s voice is just one of many viewpoints and ultimately, Fox is cast off, as other voices are heard and his is extinguished.
It is appropriate that the last voice we hear is the voice of Fox’s killer. By this time, he is totally silenced.
CD: Nested within the novel is this family legend about the Hindenburg disaster. Several characters reference it and we see how it varies based on their point of view. As a reader, it made me think about how this community passes down stories about strange or eccentric individuals. We also see characters considering Francis Fox’s legacy. How do you think Weiland will look back on Francis Fox? Do you feel that’s hinted at in the book?
JCO: Yes, many communities and families have largely unexamined “legends” in their history—tales people spin to make themselves more important, their families more colorful. There are parts of the US, like Oklahoma, where most families claim Native American ancestors—it’s just part of family lore; but if examined, probably most of these ancestors never existed.
Odd events in American history often raise more questions than can be answered, and the Hindenburg disaster is one of these. When I researched the “accident” it seemed to me very peculiar, and the reason for the explosion very vague. Soon then, the U.S. entered World War II against Nazi Germany, so there was never any thorough investigation of the event.
It is altogether possible that the Hindenburg was sabotated by someone anti-Nazi and quite possible, if not probable, that a reclusive person in the Pine Barrens region took a shot at the dirigible drifting overhead like a figure in a Magritte painting.
You didn’t inquire about the structure of the novel which was a primary interest for me: the classic “whodunnit” with a body discovered in the first chapter, a complicated backstory, characters with motives, a detective, his investigation, “clues”—all dramatized along a time-line—with a definitive ending, conclusion. For me, it was a hugely challenging experiment which I would probably not try again, following soon after my collection of thematically linked short stories, Zero-Sum, written during the pandemic and months of quarantine.
It is my belief that we are often given explanations for events—“official reports”— but these are likely to be limited, and sometimes misleading; so, the epilogue to a mystery would likely require new evidence not known or suppressed at the time. “Cold case” mysteries are solved sometimes decades later when more evidence is discovered.
It would always be said at the Langhorne Academy that Francis Fox was an exceptional teacher, a “prize winning poet with a national reputation” who died in an unfortunate accident; but just a few people know the real story, and they will never tell.
Of how many of our revered heroes might this be said? Our national, celebrated heroes? Persons whose likenesses are on U.S. postal stamps? One does not have to be a cynic, but rather a neutral observer with a sense of humor, to ask such a question.