Have you ever wondered why turkey vultures are bald? The answer is not pleasant. Turkey vultures feed on the viscera of dead animals, and sliding their heads into and out of carcasses — preferably through the anus — is easier without feathers.
Turkey vultures are scavengers; they see opportunity where others can’t bring themselves to look.
In this they bear some resemblance to serious novelists, like Joyce Carol Oates, who, at 87, has made an astonishing career in part by turning over what others wouldn’t touch, sliding into the darkest orifices, pushing forward until she’s found all the tenderest bits. Her novels can be hard to stomach, but for this she can blame reality. Some truths are revolting.
Oates’s latest novel is “Fox†(Hogarth), which begins at the Wieland Swamp in southern New Jersey, where turkey vultures circle ominously over what turns out to be a human corpse. At first, the corpse is unidentifiable — due to “significant animal activity,†as the police chief puts it — but is found alongside a vehicle belonging to Francis Fox, a popular new teacher at the prestigious local prep school, the Langhorne Academy.
“Fox,” by Joyce Carol Oates, Hogarth, 672 pages, $42.Â
In an , Oates described the novel as a “classic whodunit,†and the unfolding of the police inquiry — and multiple related storylines — is mostly propulsive, despite the novel’s 672 pages and some tiresome stylistic tics (so many words are in italics). The most impressive structural feature is the superb twist ending. This is a book that continues to change shape until the very last page.
But the novel’s real interest lies in its anatomy of the crimes of Francis Fox — a predator, as his name implies, who preys on his middle-school students — and the institutions and norms that make his behaviour possible. Oates does not seek out the origins of his conduct in some childhood trauma or — as in the case of “Lolitaâ€â€™s Humbert Humbert — a thwarted erotic encounter, but in Fox’s own sense of superiority. Fox is the product of a partial Ivy League education — he was ejected from a Columbia PhD program for plagiarism — and the heir to a Romantic tradition that insists on the individual’s right to transgress convention in pursuit of his own personal ideal of beauty.
Fox quotes Blake and Thoreau as his grandiloquent authorities — “God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages†— as he flatters himself that his obsession with prepubescent girls is a sign of esthetic refinement.
Fox keeps a bust of Edgar Allan Poe — who married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia — on his desk, and fills his apartment with the paintings of the controversial French Polish painter Balthus, best known for his prurient portraits of very young female models. In this way, Oates’s analysis of child abuse goes beyond the psychology of the criminal to indict American society, where every educated child is expected to know Poe’s poems and where Balthus’s portraits hang in the Met.
On a more immediate level, the adult characters in “Fox†are guilty of extreme neglect.
In the same interview with People, Oates described Fox as a “charming con man,†but the novel has no sympathy for the adults who let themselves be conned. Teachers on hiring committees neglect to look into Fox’s past, though several red flags call out for closer scrutiny. Later, rather than raising alarm bells, the attention Fox receives from his female students elicits jealousy from his petty colleagues. Parents, too, are fooled by Fox, and lulled into a moral stupor by their reluctance to believe the worst.
Even those who harbour suspicions prove unwilling to jeopardize their professional status by levelling accusations against a teacher who has made himself a favourite of the headmistress.
One of the few adult characters to see through Francis Fox is a lawyer Fox hires to help him through his first scandal with a student. (Fox tries to quote Kierkegaard to the lawyer: “The crowd is a lie … The individual is the highest truth.â€) The lawyer has nothing but contempt for Fox, but professional pride makes him pursue the best possible settlement for his client — an outcome that all but ensures that Fox will be able to continue teaching.
How did things get so bad? The novel hints that the community’s (almost complete) failure to stop Fox has something to do with the fragmentation of the community itself.
The rich and the poor of “Foxâ€â€™s Atlantic County have almost nothing to do with each other. Instead, the locals — “poor whites,†“old families that have failed to thrive in the twenty-first century, left behind by the computerized, high-tech economy†— are filled with resentment for the smug nouveau riche who try to ignore them while enjoying a much more comfortable existence, one they seek to make hereditary by sending their children to Langhorne and onward to the Ivy League.
Political scientists like Katherine Cramer have been warning of the growing rents in the American social fabric caused by the increasing distance between the well-off and the hard-done-by. As Cramer and her co-author put it in a recent piece in , “Constitutional democracy flourishes when people feel common purpose with one another, and it is impossible for people who never come into contact to build that common purpose.â€
The institutions depicted by Oates serve not to advance a common purpose — or enforce a shared morality — but to prop up the strivers while grinding down the rest.
This is an unflattering portrait, but not a hopeless one. Over a long and illustrious career — including a National Book Award for Fiction (1970), a National Humanities Medal (2010) and a “by the same author†page in “Fox†that looks like the sides of the Stanley Cup — Oates has sometimes been accused of trafficking in moral turpitude for its own sake.
A claimed that “Ms. Oates … is as cavalierly cynical as a teenager. Her stock in trade is precisely not to be shocked, and she pretends to be equally, mildly, analytically interested in all forms of human behaviour, however grotesque.†But “Fox†reads more like a quiet jeremiad against complacency and hypocrisy, masquerading as a coolly analytic murder mystery.
In a Oates claimed that the serious writer must recognize that his or her destiny is inescapably “part of the nation’s spiritual condition.†More than 50 years later, Oates has become an integral part of her nation’s spiritual condition, circling its revolting truths as the tireless turkey vulture circles a kill. A weak stomach is no excuse for looking away.
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