Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * An "enthralling" ( Los Angeles Times ) and "remarkably engrossing" ( The New York Times Book Review , Editors' Choice) novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school--by legendary author Joyce Carol Oates
"Eerie, shocking, provoking, and beautifully written."--Gillian Flynn
"I found it mesmerizing front to back."--Michael Connelly
"I can't remember the last time I read something so (darkly, disconcertingly) addictive."--Rebecca Makkai
"An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other mystery I've read."--Joseph Finder
"Tom Ripley, eat your heart out."--NPR
"A classic psychological suspense."-- People
"A dark, daring plunge into literary suspense . . . Oates dissects the predator-prey dynamic with merciless precision."-- The Seattle Times
AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Vulture, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, AV Club, AARP
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.
A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates's Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can't outfox. Written in Oates's trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.
"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. A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates's Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can't outfox. Written in Oates's trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery"-- Provided by publisher.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
In September 2013, Francis Fox gets a job teaching English at Langhorne Academy, a posh boarding school in New Jersey, and thinks he has landed on his feet. Fox's teaching career has been marked by frequent moves from one exclusive private school to the next as he dodges rumors of inappropriate behavior with the teenage girls in his classes. At Langhorne, he turns on the charm to rapidly become beloved by parents, students, colleagues, and the headmistress. But by November, he is believed dead, his car having been found submerged in a ravine, with parts of an unidentified body strewn about the woods. Oates's (We Were the Mulvaneys) latest weaves together a murder mystery, an examination of pedophilia, and an analysis of town-versus-gown tensions. Most saliently, she explores human gullibility and the vulnerability of young girls. Oates digs deeply into her characters; not a student, parent, detective, teacher, or even dog escapes her penetrating gaze. VERDICT Tackling Oates's lengthy novel feels something like running a marathon, breathless, through a foreboding landscape. She is at her best here: insightful, unrelenting, and devastating.--Jacqueline Snider
Publishers Weekly Review
This captivating whodunit from Oates (Butcher) dives into the twisted mind of a pedophile and the mystery behind his untimely death. Francis Fox, the charming new 30-something English teacher at Langhorne Academy in 2013 New Jersey, grooms his female middle school students by encouraging their writing before kissing and fondling them in his office during private meetings. His career began in Pennsylvania, where he quietly left a school after one of his victims died by suicide (the girl left behind evidence of their inappropriate relationship in her diary, but Francis's lawyer saved him with some dirty tricks). Steeled by quotes from Kierkegaard ("The crowd is a lie"; "The individual is the highest truth") and delusions of his virtue compared to Nabokov's "sick pervert" Humbert Humbert, Francis remains unrepentant. Over the course of the nonlinear narrative, in which a dismembered body discovered at a pond near Langhorne is eventually identified as Francis's, Oates gradually unravels the story of how Fox wound up at Langhorne and his body wound up at the pond. Francis's warped logic is as irresistible as Oates's wonderfully bizarre descriptions (in one scene, Francis strolls past seagull droppings that look to him "like leprosy or the acne of a brain beset by spurious notions of guilt not his own but foisted upon him by dwarf-souled others"). Oates is at the top of her game. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)
Booklist Review
Francis Fox is every parent's, school official's, and small-town cop's worst nightmare. He's a wily creature, having narrowly avoided prison after a former student whom he was sexually abusing died by suicide. But Fox has adopted a new name, a new identity, and landed a new position as a middle-school English teacher at a prestigious South Jersey private school. To her credit, Langhorne Academy's headmistress thought there was something off about Fox, but he was just so darned charming. The students worship him, especially Genevieve, Mary Ann, and Eunice, the ones he calls "kitten," whom he ushers into his office after hours and plies with drug-laced cookies. When Fox's car is found in a remote, marshy ravine, his body nearly unrecognizable, and the cause of death is inconclusive, the community reels. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? The investigation rocks this insulated enclave to its core. 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.
Kirkus Book Review
Oates continues to explore the dark side in this moody, often shocking mystery. Francis Fox doesn't enter the narrative until five dozen pages in, and when he does we find him in a sickening act: Deep-kissing a 12-year-old girl, "of which Little Kitten will never speak to others." Little Kitten is but one of Fox's victims, and he's in a perfect position to recruit more: Having been caught in the act in another state, he has changed his name and moved to a small town in the woods of south New Jersey, Oates' fictional terroir, and has resumed his revolting avocation as a middle school teacher. But as the story opens, Fox is perhaps no more: The denizens of and visitors to Wieland Pond--a forbidding swamp, "a wilderness in which cell phones are useless"--have noticed an unusual stench in a place full of them, as well as a rolled-over car and body parts. Lacking the means to quickly identify the victim, whose face is missing from its detached head, the local gendarmerie takes its time, with world-weary detective Horace Zwender slowly piecing together enough evidence of Fox's crimes to think, "No one more deserving of beingdead." Meanwhile, suspicion of murder falls on members of the rough-and-ready Healy family, one of whose ancestors is rumored to have shot down theHindenburg, and one of whose present members is among Fox's targets. Oates' descriptions of Fox's acts are stomach-turningly graphic but not prurient, as if to emphasize how a dangerous predator can move freely in an unending field of prey. But in the end she delivers a tautly wound procedural, elegantly written (and with a Nabokovian in-joke that joinsLolita to her tale), with an expertly constructed surprise ending. It's not for the squeamish, but Oates once again masterfully limns the worse angels of our nature. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
TextPublisher: London ; New York : Hogarth, [2025]Edition: First editionDescription: 651 pages ; 25 cmContent type: