The renowned author, “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers,” writes a gripping book of literary and psychological suspense about the sinister secrets that emerge following the startling disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school (New York Times Magazine).
Fox, which is eerie, startling, thought-provoking, and exquisitely written, is another evidence that Oates is one of the best authors of our time. Flynn, Gillian
Francis Fox is who? Fox, a charismatic English teacher who recently arrived at the exclusive boarding school Langhorne Academy, captivates many of his students, their parents, and fellow students while leaving others perplexed by his origins and the mystery surrounding his biography. The entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, starts to have unsettling suspicions about Francis Fox and his true identity after two brothers find Fox’s car partially submerged in a pond in a nearby nature preserve and pieces of an unidentified body scattered throughout the surrounding woods.
As it explores the deepest recesses of the human psyche and poses important moral queries regarding justice and the reaction evil requires, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox is a captivating, soaring story of crime and complicity, retaliation and reparations, victim vs. predator. Francis Fox, a character as seductively evil as Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, charms and controls almost everyone in his vicinity until he finally encounters someone he can not outmanoeuvre. With several points of view interwoven and written in Oates’s signature personal, expansive sty…..