Where her previous books explored childhood possession and teenage hysteria, mediated through Cuban mythology, Yoruba storytelling and the Gothic novel, Mr. Fox threads a story of love and literary ambition through the texture of fairy tales, and sees her extending the range and clarity of her voice to remarkable effect. It is an incredibly self-reflexive book, in which the symptom of and solution to everything is the writing of stories, and structurally it resembles a dropped pack of cards; but it's also funny, deep, shocking, wry, heart-warming and spine-chilling.
Fox and Foxe’s stories, written together, gain gravity and depth. Now the characters can connect, even if these connections are fraught and painful. Oyeyemi never lets go her ability to turn a phrase, but here she uses her powers for the gut-level work, the agony and beauty of passion and love. And the stories are wonderful … The book makes a case for itself and its unusual structure that is utterly convincing. Some readers may crave more overt connections between the stories. Yet they create a mosaic between Fox and Foxe, a cracked portrait of love, all the while working as a refracted mirror of the relationship between husband and wife, which has been strained by the dominance of Mr. Fox’s increasingly active fantasy world … Charm is a quality that overflows in this novel, and it works under its best definition: as a kind of magical attraction and delight.
Mary comes to life in many of the 10 stories that Mr. Fox creates, but she also comes off the page to haunt, help and entertain both Daphne and Mr. Fox in their everyday lives, which, thanks to Mary, aren't so everyday. Oyeyemi dares us to wonder what exactly Mary is: an author's inspiration or something more complex — a charming combination of ghost, conscience, marriage counselor and heroine … Oyeyemi has a tireless imagination and doesn't stay put for long. It can feel like a jolt when she intermittently detours out of Mr. Fox's world of stories and returns us to his and Daphne's struggling marriage. But it's a testament to the strength of Oyeyemi's concept and its brilliant execution that, like Mr. Fox, we much prefer to escape into his inner life than to confront his reality.
Like Oyeyemi’s previous books, this story probes the status of outsiders and shadow selves. But it is very much a departure, a postmodern puzzler that, despite its screwball moments, is inspired by the pre-modern: the bloody and bizarre English folk tale ‘Mister Fox,’ Charles Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ and the Grimm Brothers’ ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ … What follows includes a clutch of short stories in which the writer tries to kick his killing habit, as well as a few folk tales and various scenarios featuring versions of Fox and Foxe … In Mr. Fox, however, what she does not do — and doesn’t seem to have any intention of doing — is make it all cohere.
Mary Foxe is Mr. Fox’s critic-cum-muse, here a real character, there a ghost. In some chapters she is flesh and blood, in others only a shadow. In every one she taunts him. Is she real? Don’t ask Mr. Fox (his grip on reality is tenuous at best) … The stories take imaginative, sometimes jarring tangents, and it’s easy to wonder whether every detour drives the main story forward, but this may be part of Oyeyemi’s conceit: No matter how fanciful the stories we create to explain the world may be, the reality of the world is infinitely more unpredictable and bizarre, and we like it that way.
Over 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.
Mr. Fox is most notably a bit of slipstream fiction whose most pronounced effect, especially in the first half, is to leave the reader struggling for a foothold. Tucked within this framework are short stories, presumably written by Mr. Fox, that play with themes of marriage, men and men's attitudes about women … I found the stories within the story profoundly less captivating than the framework tale. Part of this is Oyeyemi's writing voice, which has a consistently cool, crisp tone … As for Mary, she's the best invention of them all. Created merely to do a service for her maker, and imagined as a beautiful, sexy and controllable creature, she does what any strong spirit must do: She grows a mind of her own.
This mesmerizing set of tales juxtaposes the romance and violence of fairy tales with that which occurs in the real world. Foreboding bits are borrowed from the story of Bluebeard and from Grimm's Fitcher's Bird, but the novel reaches deeper than these already dark tales … The Fox(e) stories begin as rather simple doomed romances with allusions to these stories and characters, but the fairy tale elements become more prominent throughout the book until it's nearly impossible to distinguish what's real and what's imaginary … While the book's concept is unique, the prose is pretty much perfect, and the allusions are rich, this is what has stuck with me most since reading the book: I've been tricked into identifying with a victim that I never imagined I could.
The Mr. Fox of the title (and there are plenty of other Mr. Foxes here) is a novelist who kills off his heroines. He is living in 1930s New York with his younger wife Daphne, whom he tends to neglect while creating his fiction—a neglect akin to adultery since he is visited with increasing frequency by his imaginary but alluring muse Mary … The language is crystalline and the images startling, but forget any resemblance to linear logic in what is ultimately a treatise on love, on male subjugation of women and on the creative experience.
Stories-within-stories (Mr. Fox's fiction) wrestle their way in as well, and include the intriguing tale of an orphan boy in Egypt and a Nigerian girl with a heavy heart; and an impossible little girl's paid companion. Mr. Fox certainly does seem intent on having his female characters endure gruesome circumstances, a tendency that his muse appears to challenge, though this critical aspect also remains obscure. The pleasure of Oyeyemi's gorgeous language and brilliant sensibility is almost entirely overtaken by the author's preoccupation with understanding the architecture of her own book.
