Fox
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- 139,00 kr
Publisher Description
‘Chilling’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Utterly mesmeric’ GUARDIAN
‘Impressive and unsettling’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘Eerie, shocking, provoking’ GILLIAN FLYNN
‘Rich in suspense, diabolical secrets and psychological insight’ ECONOMIST
A spellbinding 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.
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.
'Hauntingly explores the way that beguiling figures can inspire, create and shape art’ LOS ANGELES TIMES
'Mesmerizing' MICHAEL CONNELLY
'Oates is a genius' REBECCA MAKKAI
'Oates views the US through a gothic prism, forming images as striking as they are disturbing' FINANCIAL TIMES
'Absolutely chilling … this is Oates at her most disturbing and masterful’ SEATTLE TIMES
'Inescapably abhorrent yet enthralling … Oates understands, as always, how to keep us on the hook’ LOS ANGELES TIMES
'Engrossing even as it horrifies and reminds us that we cannot nor should not look away’ BIG ISSUE
‘A tautly wound procedural, elegantly written … Oates once again masterfully limns the worse angels of our nature’ KIRKUS REVIEWS
‘Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative’ BOOKLIST
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
