Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.
TRIGGER WARNING: CSA. I wish this book had come with a trigger warning because I'm not sure I would have read it, had I know the extent and depravity and disgusting details of years of Child Sexual Assault that were depicted. It was well written and intriguing but I couldn't get over the ick and just horrible feeling of the CSA. If you can get over that part, it is an excellent book.
Nostalgia: yearning for something that never was recalled with much maudlin emotion as if it had ever been.Francis Fox feels not the merest wisp of nostalgia for the childhood of "Frank Farrell," which he can barely remember and which he may have conflated with films and TV of the era of an equal banality and tedium. Long estranged from his thoroughly undistinguished parents, siblings. Descended from thoroughly undistinguished ancestors. Not even a modest fortune in the Farrell family, no estate to inherit even if (a sizable if) he'd have been a probable heir.
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