Review: Joyce Carol Oates returns with a suspenseful prep-school tale

At close to 700 pages, Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel Fox can seem like a task, meant to be considered at a deliberate pace over weeks. When I finally closed the book at 3:40 a.m. on a Saturday, breathless and tired, I felt almost as if I had been running for days. 

Reviews of the novel have repeatedly mentioned its use of suspense. Oates is well versed in furor, in getting blood rushing through your ears while you’re just reading about an interview, an appointment or a hallway conversation. 

The book’s setup is simple enough: The prestigious Langhorne Academy hires Francis Fox as their new English teacher for seventh and eighth grades. He quickly wins over the administration and commands an enthusiastic following among the students. When he is mysteriously absent, questions arise, panic sets in, and the sleepy New Jersey town of Wieland is rocked. 

What might be tersely summarized in a news report as the “collective mourning” in the aftermath of tragedy is, for Oates, a chance to limn a New Jersey community that should be familiar to those living in nondescript, relatively affluent suburbs. 

The whodunit suspense in Fox emerges as readers make the same evaluations of character that they see the cast making. New information about each character is always around the corner, making the mere reading of the book a notably political exercise. Oates hits on all the big buzzwords of the contemporary culture: Fox’s inward contempt of feminists and outward decrial of pornography; Fox’s status in the eyes of the hiring committee as a white male. Her liberal use of italics manifests the significance of connotation to the story. Social life, especially among those with appearances to keep, rests on inference, on mutual understanding, on tradition, on suggestion. In other words, ignorance and pride. Throughout the novel, people repeatedly ask some version of “Did you hear about that? How awful.”

Dialogue rarely flows in the novel; comments from characters are interspersed with reflective asides, impulsive condemnations or cautious hypotheses. The pace is sometimes ponderous—Oates likes to show her characters thinking, judging and feeling. It is a third-person narrative but with a heavy dose of indirect discourse, especially disquieting as the intractable divides between characters are accented later in the book. Watching the characters process each other and their circumstances is more than enough to keep a reader enthralled. Scenes unfold and are later replayed from a different perspective. 

The initial meeting between the town’s detective, H. Zwender, and the local prep school headmistress, P. Cady, is tense—precisely because Cady evaluates Zwender as a local, a “brute among brutes,” and Zwender, upon revisiting his first impression, resents being treated “like a tradesman or deliveryman” but thinks of her as an “innocent fool.” 

Oates takes care to build out the community around the prep school. She portrays the interactions between Langhorne and the community, in fact, far more than the internal dynamics of the school itself. Some of the drama takes place on school property, but it is all correlated directly to Francis Fox: the meek librarian’s quiet pining for him, the students’ adoration, the administration’s acceptance. Everyone has their own reasons for liking him; he caters to all. 

Fox’s students love him; they would die for him. Langhorne parents explain away their daughters’ rapid weight loss and emotional distress with an adage—You know how girls are. Adult ignorance is born from conventional wisdom. Conversely, masculinity in particular confers authority; one Langhorne mother insists Fox “wasn’t like that…he was a gentleman.” Fox can be the English teacher everyone wants him to be, and no one will think otherwise. How could they?

Fox loathes Lolita. He finds the book “pornographic” and “indefensible,” all the while bloviating to Langhorne’s young librarian, Ms. Hood, about Nabokov being gay. The young librarian defers to Fox’s “Moral core. A kind of old-style, intrepid manliness rarely seen today.” Fox the novel is clearly in oblique dialogue with Lolita (as Fox is with his fellow teacher, Quilty). That said, while Nabokov invites one to read, interpret and then question reading and interpretation, Oates prefers to exhibit Fox’s posturing and have the reader re-examine interpersonal interpretations they might have already made. Oates, who taught at Princeton for nearly four decades, wrote Fox having waded through male-dominated academic circles for a long while.

The arc of all the characters in Fox is credible, even that of Fox; it’s a great credit to the book. Fox might seem to carry an unnatural sway, but attentive readers witness the particulate elements of manipulation. Good old American manipulation, but perhaps with some flair. Cryptic verse in italics appears throughout the book, and Fox’s web of trite literary references insulates him perfectly. He lures students in with heady, romantic quotations from Poe and Yeats. Fox readies for his classes “like one preparing for a fight which, he has no doubt, he will win.” He smiles, wears tweed and has “sandy hair.”

He’s the consummate English teacher because people in Wieland agree he sorta seems like one. He fits arbitrary expectations, archetypes that were decided long before him and that will outlive him. Zwender, reflecting on Fox, decides that “charisma is just another word for bullsh-t.”

We all perhaps have had the feeling of having our perception of a person, perhaps a public figure, completely upended by scandal. In this case, Fox’s acts of abuse are established quite early; how the town deals with it, and what exactly they know, is quite another matter. Fox consistently takes on those dinner-table appraisals of people, a hallmark of human society, and shows just how flimsy they can be. The book does not necessarily moralize against such judgments—they are inevitable in social beings—but plays on the tensions these judgments introduce to daily life. They can even be fun, as when Headmistress Cady muses to herself: “Why do men wear rings?” When the stakes are highest, you realize just how similar life is to a middle school classroom. 

In an age defined by snatches of information and snap judgments about people’s personal lives shared widely online, Oates does well to get beyond a headline and paint a nuanced picture of each character. Everyone has quirks, flaws and pathologies; no one quite lives up to their reputation. Reputation itself is a collection of microscopic assumptions about a person’s traits or nature, made by people with biases and kinks in their own natures. Those who had harbored private suspicions of Fox from the beginning are vindicated, but does that necessarily justify their intuition? What is the essence of an abuser?

Investigative journalism in the past two decades about the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church has typically featured reporting about cover-ups, all the way up to the Vatican. For church institutions, it seems that the practice of reassigning abusive priests relied on people’s intuitions—people assumed the offending priest was “not that kind of man.” You can’t really blame people for having positive opinions of those who are kind to them (if they don’t know any better), but that is precisely how abusers get away with it. Information lags, and people go on what they have. 

Christianity figures into the novel: Oates is herself an ex-Catholic. For better or worse, her suburban American portrait would not be complete without religion, and the particular brands of Christianity in the story add to the accuracy of the novel as a picture of America. Detective Zwender’s assistant, Odom, is a devout Christian. As the investigation of Fox’s disappearance goes on, revelations of the extent of his abuse are grim, and Odom’s strict piety starts to slip. The whole town is slipping, and Langhorne has slipped up as well.

In a striking moment near the end, Zwender and Odom are in a particularly tense interview with a person of interest to the investigation. As Zwender continues his questions, Odom breaks procedure and offers to pray with the suspect, to “Ask Jesus the best way forward.” In the suspect’s mind, Christ is a comforter rather than a judge, whose way is “not to lead but to allow you to feel what must be done.” 

A contemplative note rings clearly through the thrills of the book, and Fox makes readers examine and re-examine their intuition. In a time when people prefer internet-led snap judgments, it is critical to wonder how and why we make them. The novel offers a perfect counterpoint to contemporary reasoning—an alternative to all that is hasty, sweeping and solitary. 

This article appears in October 2025.

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