Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox's car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.
Impressive and unsettling ... Horrifying yet remarkably engrossing ... The mystery provides a narrative throughline that Oates expertly uses to toggle back and forth between the past and present.
Fox has the bones of a potboiler but is supported by the sinew of the author’s elegant structure and syntax. She draws on natural imagery and a haunting sense of the macabre, castigating the reader‘s too-easy assumptions. The book incorporates a delightfully complicated, interwoven cast of characters in small-town New Jersey; elements of class, gentrification and divided families create opportunity for misunderstanding and misdirection ... The novel is a whodunit, but to reduce it entirely to that distinction would be inaccurate ... Inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling ... This is a chilling reminder that artistic mentors can be abusive in many different ways ... Fox hauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art.
Oates owns the realm of genre-fluid fiction that focuses on the physical and psychological vulnerabilities of young women. Her latest foray explores the disturbing and chilling milieu of pedophilia from the viewpoints of predator and prey, protector and victim, exposing how easily people can be misled and the devastating consequences of misplaced trust. Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative.
