MR. FOX by Helen Oyeyemi (Penguin), 336 pages, $22 cloth. Rating: NNNN
Is Brit author Helen Oyeyemi really only 26? Mr. Fox displays more worldly wisdom and literary craft than a 20-something ought to have.
St. John Fox, a successful New York novelist in the 1930s, likes to knock off his female protagonists. His current heroine, Mary Foxe, will not go down without a fight. She haunts him, tries to seduce him and eventually comes to life, even recruiting Fox’s wife, Daphne, who’s misconstrued her husband’s distracted behaviour as that of a man having an affair.
This narrative – brilliantly tapping the old Bluebeard tale – is broken up by stories written by Foxe and Fox about the push-pull of their relationship. In one, a woman is attracted to a psychotherapist she meets on a plane who may have killed his wife. In another, delinquent boys are trained to be “world-class husbands.” The fact that each of these tales could stand on its own is testimony to their virtuosity.
Mixed in are more stories, variations on the Bluebeard myth, all expertly conceived as well.
The tone swings from wry to angry, and the results are both hilarious and horrifying. Only an immensely skilled writer could keep all this under control.
Underneath the crafty narrative is a passionate rumination on creativity and intimacy, a vivid instance of the difficulty of keeping one’s characters under control, and a feminist response to the murderous preoccupations of male writers.
Somehow, this is the work of a seasoned and accomplished writer.
Stunning.
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