PositiveFull StopOver the course of Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi playfully casts and recasts these two central characters into a series of loosely connected love stories. Accordingly, Mr. Fox reads more like a short story collection than it does a novel, with each story vaguely echoing rather than building upon the last. As these stories progress, Mary and Mr. Fox begin to not only write stories together, but to inhabit them as well, and as Mary transforms Mr. Fox from author to subject matter, she slowly exposes to him his own brutality … The novel is predicated on the idea that knowledge of brutality can precipitate change. At the root of each story are Oyeyemi’s musings about the transformative power of storytelling.
