Book Notes: Fox by Joyce Carol Oates

Mr Fox comes to a prestigious private school in New England and begins to prey on 12-year-old girls. His students are starved for male attention. They rarely meet male teachers. For many of them, having a relationship with their father is an impossible dream. It’s easy for a pedophile like Fox to mesmerize them into submission.

One of the stricken students is Eunice Pfenning. Her father, a loyal, loving, responsible man, was ejected from the family home by the bored, brooding wife. Eunice is unattractive, so even the pedophile doesn’t want her, and this devastates the besotted girl.

The most poignant scenes in the novel are those describing Martin Pfenning, the man who suddenly finds himself thrown out of his family and his home for which he always did and continues to bear solitary financial responsibility. Pfenning thought he did everything right. He worked hard, respected his wife, provided an excellent living for his family. But his wife got bored and threw him out, destroyed his relationship with their daughter, and at no point saw herself as the villain of the situation.

There are several such bored divorcees in the novel who provide victims to the pedophile Fox. There’s also a cast of lonely lefty spinsters who enable Fox’s abuse of children. None of this excuses Fox who is a disgusting bastard freak. But you can’t help wondering how we arrived at the current situation where impermanent means good and attachment means bad.

I don’t want to give out any spoilers but I’ll say that the agents of good in the novel are working class men united by love of God, the desire to protect the weak, and male solidarity. What was broken by stupid, prattling, self-involved women and the pedophile these women invariably adore, these men repair. Of course, the damage can never be fully erased but there’s hope that we can step away from the brink. Because that’s what some of the characters in the novel did.

I hope everybody now understands why I said that I can’t believe that Oates’ prattly, lefty, wokey X account was written by the same person who wrote this novel. There’s so much more there than what I can mention in this post. There’s mockery of school administrators who exclude white men from jobs, there’s ridicule aimed at the obligatory portrayal of interracial couples in ads, there’s mention of how liberal elite schools have become and how they train their students to be insufferable snowflakes. Suffice it to say that the character who is appalled by the idea that she might hire somebody who is not “a woman of color” is quite indifferent to the realization that she hired a pedophile who filmed students being abused and sold images online.