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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
One of Granta 's Best Young British Novelists
From the prizewinning young writer of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.
Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently.
Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. Their adventures twist the fairy tale into nine variations, exploding and teasing conventions of genre and romance, and each iteration explores the fears that come with accepting a lifelong bond. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox's game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?
The extraordinarily gifted Helen Oyeyemi has written a love story like no other. Mr. Fox is a magical book, endlessly inventive, as witty and charming as it is profound in its truths about how we learn to be with one another.
Author Notes
Helen Oyeyemi was born on December 10, 1984 in Nigeria. She attended Corpus Christie College and later graduated form Cambridge University in 2006. She has authored seven books including: Boy, Snow, Bird, What is Not Yours in Not Yours, Mr. Fox and The Icarus Girl. She won the PEN/Open Book Award in 2017 for "What is Not Yours is Not Yours".
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set primarily in 1930s New York, Oyeyemi's latest novel follows the adventures of a famous novelist, Mr. Fox, with a penchant for murdering his heroines. His life and work are transformed by the discovery of his muse, Mary. But when Mr. Fox's wife, Daphne, becomes convinced her husband is having an affair, the novelist finds himself forced to make a very difficult decision. Carole Boyd's narration is playful, well paced, and utterly enjoyable. She captures the spirit of the fantastical prose and creates restrained but effective voices-employing several pitch-perfect accents and dialects-for Oyeyemi's characters. One of the many highlights is Boyd's rendition of the rich American teenager to whom she lends a wonderfully flat, bored tone. A Riverhead hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Solitary writer St. John Fox is shocked when his imaginary muse, Mary Foxe, waltzes into his study, all flesh and blood and none too pleased with him. Mary has come to take him to task for the brutal ways in which he kills his female literary creations in his stories. Mary lures Mr. Fox into telling different kinds of tales, among them one that casts her as a nanny with literary aspirations and him as a celebrated author whose attention she craves. Their stories take them from New York to Egypt to London, but while Mr. Fox is enjoying his literary jaunts with Mary, his wife, Daphne, starts to worry that she is losing her husband to another woman. When Daphne comes across a list comparing her and Mary, Mr. Fox realizes he is going to have to choose between his beguiling muse and his spirited wife. An imaginative romp through the mind of a writer, Oyeyemi's delightful novel shows that the power of creativity can be both isolating and redeeming.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HELEN OYEYEMI'S captivating new novel, "Mr. Fox," begins with a jaunty spirit and a sense of play. We meet Mr. Fox; he is a writer of slasher books, and he has an assistant, a woman named Mary whom he conjured in a trench during his days fighting in World War I. He also has a wife, Daphne. At some point or other, all three of them write. Mr. Fox is also a reference to the English folk tale character Bluebeard - a man who murders and dismembers women freely until his wife-to-be, the clever Lady Mary, turns the tables and exposes him. This book's Mary (full name Mary Foxe) acts like a muse and is called a muse, but she is more than that, and I actually wish Oyeyemi had kept the word clear out of the book. Mary is mysterious, both tangible and intangible, crossing fluidly between dreams and reality. She is far more involved than a muse, or an inspiration. She's an alternate life, a safety net - and also the one who knows how best to push Mr. Fox and rip that safety net away. The premise is established in the first few chapters: Mary is tired of seeing Mr. Fox kill all the women in his books, and seems, to imply that he's avoiding any conflict, any real connection, by opting for easy decapitation. That his murder stories provide an easy out is both funny and believable; Mary the taskmaster is asking him to explore the murkier, scarier territory of human connection pre-death. It's a satisfying and unexpected refraining of violence toward women - Mary is not only protesting the act itself; she is angry about the artistic dodging. The two start to collaborate, cautiously, and a sequence of back-and-forth storytelling follows. The reader is left to" figure out whose story is whose, as Fox and Foxe spar creatively, making new tales and striving to avoid pat endings. At first the writers, who are also recurring characters in, their own stories, don't even meet in the world of their fictions. They must find their footing: if there is no dramatic death moment, then how on earth do stories go? How do people interact? Through letters, perhaps, but never in person. Through missed meetings, or elusive glimpses, or, once, another murder, because Mr. Fox can't help himself. These early pieces reflect the newness of this kind of storytelling for both writers. And in part because of the sef up, this section is lighter; there's a bit of a "solve the puzzle" feeling, as the reader tries to discern who is writing what and when. That solving mode can offer its own pleasures, but it's also tricky. The pages are enjoyable, and well written, but they don't yet hint at the riches to come. In a way, this makes sense. The writerly flirtation and competition between Mary and Mr. Fox are mere glances and winks; the two have not yet embarked on a true discussion and investigation of the nature of violence and love. But compared with the rest of the book, the beginning belies Oyeyemi's gifts. Maybe it's necessary, as Mary and Mr. Fox are also figuring out the rules, but it took a while to trust Oyeyemi's intent. Once I did, I was in, fully. In the middle, Fox and Foxe's stories, written together, gain gravity and depth. Now the characters can connect, even if these connections are fraught and painful. Oyeyemi never lets go her ability to turn a phrase, but here she uses her powers for the gut-level work, the agony and beauty of passion and love. And the stories are wonderful. Whether it's a tragedy about a model whose father is dying after having committed a brutal act of violence, or a fairy tale about heart and body and aloneness, or a fascinating romp involving a prep school as we've never seen one before, or an unexpectedly moving story of a fox and his lover, Oyeyemi's writing is gorgeous and resonant and fresh. "The words didn't come easily," she says of one character who has discovered her own capacity to write. "She put large spaces between some of them for fear they would attack one another." Words are this active - they can harm, they can soothe; they are living creatures, participants in image and tale, just as Mary is, constructed as she is by Mr. Fox's imagination (or is she?), and even as Mr. Fox is, constructed as he is by Oyeyemi's. The violence in these stories also changes from the cartoonish Mr. Fox violence of fairy tales, which is frightening but funny, jokey at the start, to real murder, to armies in occupied towns, to domestic abuse, to a gentle but firm questioning of the varied ways we care for and hurt one another. Here, the book makes a case for itself and its unusual structure that is utterly convincing. Some readers may crave more overt connections between the stories. Yet they create a mosaic between Fox and Foxe, a cracked portrait of love, all the while working as a refracted mirror of the relationship between husband and wife, which has been strained by the dominance of Mr. Fox's increasingly active fantasy world. His daily life, his regular, ordinary world, becomes more and more relevant, and as the book progresses, the interactions among Daphne, Mr. Fox and Mary gain urgency, and that head-scratching "puzzle" feeling falls away. Oyeyemi has a talent for writing complex, often villainous situations without imposing judgment. (Even writing "domestic abuse" a few lines back felt a little false - too categorized, too diagnostic for this book.) She sidesteps any verdicts and goes instead to the raw, doing what Flannery O'Connor advises, which is to look closer, to put aside one's assumptions and instead try to view the world as it is, with curiosity and an interest in describing what one sees. Oyeyemi shows us, and shows us, but her people are allowed to do what they do without her weighing in too heavily. She writes of one of her characters: "The man liked to make things. He took a chisel to stone with kindness and enquiry, as if finding out what else the stone would like to be." His technique mirrors hers. In the folk tale, Mr. Fox lures women into his lair to kill them. Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox used to lure women into his stories and kill them. She, of course, is her own Mr. Fox, and surely she lures us in, too. Not to kill us, not to repel us, but the opposite - to hold us in these stories and give us something along the way, something complicated and genuine. Charm is a quality that overflows in this novel, and it works under its best definition: as a kind of magical attraction and delight. Oyeyemi casts her word-spell, sentence by sentence, story by story, and by the end, the oppressive lair has opened up into a shimmering landscape pulsing with life. This novel begins in jaunty solve-the-puzzle mode before opening into a complex portrait of intimacy and love. Aimee Bender's most recent book is "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake."
Guardian Review
A fairytale marriage can be murder. Helen Oyeyemi's fourth novel jumbles together variations on the Bluebeard myth ("the usual - wooing, seduction, then - the discovery of a chopped-up predecessor", should you need reminding) with a meditation on inspiration and intimacy explored through the character of a 1930s American novelist, St John Fox, whose imaginary muse, Mary Foxe, comes to life and starts to talk back to him. Over the course of the book she moves from being words on a page or a voice in the head to a flesh-and-blood woman with a penchant for trying on hats. She and Mr Fox engage in a battle of hearts and wits, much to the confusion of Mrs Fox - Daphne - who experiences Mary variously as her husband's insanity, her own haunting, and a conduit for liberation. Mr Fox or Reynardine appears in fairy tales and ballads as a spiritual brother to Bluebeard, the deadly bridegroom. St John Fox's marriage to Daphne can be seen through the filter of sinister fairytale domination or the milder tradition of masculine control: "I fixed her early. I told her in heartfelt tones that one of the reasons I love her is because she never complains. So now of course she doesn't dare complain." Mary's beef with St John is more literary: she claims he's a villain and a serial killer because his novels, like so much of literature and art and cinema through the ages, are built around the gruesome murders of women. She wants to chop his head off for a change. But as artist and inspiration, they are also aspects of each other, mysteriously conjoined. Interspersed with this strange love triangle are a series of stories, versions of the courtship-cum-duel of Mary and Mr Fox that range from the playfully metafictional to the impressionistic and obscure. In "Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold", Mary is the shy young ladies' companion who sends her stories to the famous novelist (the title is a nod at the refrain running through the fairy tale "Mr Fox", in which, refreshingly, the heroine Lady Mary triumphs through her curiosity and pluck). We encounter our Mary again as a wistful florist's assistant advertising for a "fairytale prince", a romantic novelist in hiding from the world and, in one of the novel's most charged and effective sections, a damaged young woman in present-day England negotiating the new dangers of a relationship with an older psychiatrist. Reynardine appears variously as a medium for Yoruba ancestors, and a psychopathic killer. As the book progresses, these stories refract away from the core narrative, through the magical realist fable of a boy who searches the world to construct a woman out of artworks and a girl who stores her heart in a shrine, and two sparse parables of love and incomprehension between woman and fox. ("The little girl feared the fox cub, and the fox cub felt exactly the same way about her.") By the end, Oyeyemi's narrative has danced a long way from the screwball comedy of 30s Manhattan that inspires the book cover and jacket copy. One story, "My Daughter the Racist", about the spark of female rebellion under occupation by both foreign soldiers and chauvinist society, is a socio-political tale that doesn't seem to sit with the rest of the book at all. Woven into the text are various retellings of the Bluebeard myth, such as "Fitcher's Bird", in which the heroine must reassemble the dismembered corpses of her sisters before staging her escape smeared in honey and feathers - "only a very, very young child would think of a solution like that, and only an insane person would actually try it" - as well as fragments of Emily Dickinson, medieval rules of courtly love, and incarnations of literature's grisly sexual politics such as Poe's line about nothing being more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman. Where Angela Carter exposed the hidden logic of fairy tale, Oyeyemi delights in turning that logic on its head, as with the sinister school described in "The Training at Madame de Silentio's", which turns "delinquent ruffians" into "world-class husbands" through a curriculum that includes "Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotence". A strange figure is chained at the bottom of the school lake: but is he victim or villain? She locates in the Bluebeard story not only female loss of identity but male emotional imprisonment - a locked room containing not the bloody cadavers of previous wives, but the elusive authentic self of the husband. "Why have husbands got to keep themselves all locked up, that's what I want to know," complains Daphne, driven mad by St John's passion for a figment of his own imagination; the way he will only engage with his wife as "someone he could manage", his refusal to be overwhelmed by love. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel before she sat her A-levels and is still only 26. Where her previous books explored childhood possession and teenage hysteria, mediated through Cuban mythology, Yoruba storytelling and the Gothic novel, Mr Fox threads a story of love and literary ambition through the texture of fairy tales, and sees her extending the range and clarity of her voice to remarkable effect. It is an incredibly self-reflexive book, in which the symptom of and solution to everything is the writing of stories, and structurally it resembles a dropped pack of cards; but it's also funny, deep, shocking, wry, heart-warming and spine-chilling. She offers a phantasmagorical rendering of the deepest emotional truths, not least among which is a razor-sharp dissection of the topsy-turvy logic of misogyny that blames women for the violence inflicted on them. "She's not real, honey," St John assures Daphne about Mary. "She's only an idea. I made her up." Oyeyemi breathes life into ideas like nobody else. To order Mr Fox for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Justine Jordan Interspersed with this strange love triangle are a series of stories, versions of the courtship-cum-duel of [Mary Foxe] and Mr Fox that range from the playfully metafictional to the impressionistic and obscure. In "Be Bold, Be Bold, But Not Too Bold", Mary is the shy young ladies' companion who sends her stories to the famous novelist (the title is a nod at the refrain running through the fairy tale "Mr Fox", in which, refreshingly, the heroine Lady Mary triumphs through her curiosity and pluck). We encounter our Mary again as a wistful florist's assistant advertising for a "fairytale prince", a romantic novelist in hiding from the world and, in one of the novel's most charged and effective sections, a damaged young woman in present-day England negotiating the new dangers of a relationship with an older psychiatrist. Reynardine appears variously as a medium for Yoruba ancestors, and a psychopathic killer. As the book progresses, these stories refract away from the core narrative, through the magical realist fable of a boy who searches the world to construct a woman out of artworks and a girl who stores her heart in a shrine, and two sparse parables of love and incomprehension between woman and fox. ("The little girl feared the fox cub, and the fox cub felt exactly the same way about her.") By the end, [Helen Oyeyemi]'s narrative has danced a long way from the screwball comedy of 30s Manhattan that inspires the book cover and jacket copy. One story, "My Daughter the Racist", about the spark of female rebellion under occupation by both foreign soldiers and chauvinist society, is a socio-political tale that doesn't seem to sit with the rest of the book at all. - Justine Jordan.
Kirkus Review
The Icarus Girl, 2005, etc.).The Mr. Fox of the title (and there are plenty of other Mr. Foxes here) is a novelist who kills off his heroines. He is living in 1930s New York with his younger wife Daphne, whom he tends to neglect while creating his fictiona neglect akin to adultery since he is visited with increasing frequency by his imaginary but alluring muse Mary. Mary is dissatisfied with Mr. Fox's treatment of women and challenges him, very vaguely, to a contest. Soon stories are appearingit is never quite clear whether composed by Mr. Fox or by Maryin which the roles of Lover/Murderer and Beloved/Victim go through a host of variations which bring to mind bits and pieces (as in body parts, pun intended) of various classic tales of misogyny. The serial killer Bluebeard casts a long shadow, as do the Grimm Brothers' sorcerer Fitcher and the French fox Reynardine, as well as less familiar characters from Yoruba folktales. In the first, simplest story, a man chops off his wife's head, thinking he can reattach it; he does but with problematic results. In more complex stories, women named Mary and men named Fox sometimes love each other but often commit gruesome acts of violence, physical and emotional. In the story"The Training At Madame de Silentio's," roles are somewhat reversed as young boys are schooled to become perfect husbands. Mingled among the titled stories are snatches of the growing marital crisis between Mr. Fox and Daphne, who is understandably jealous of Mr. Fox's devotion to his muse.The language is crystalline and the images startling, but forget any resemblance to linear logic in what is ultimately a treatise on love (with a clever borrowing from Cappelanus' 12th centuryThe Art of Courtly Love), on male subjugation of women and on the creative experience.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Mary Foxe came by the other day--the last person on earth I was expecting to see. I'd have tidied up if I'd known she was coming. I'd have combed my hair. I'd have shaved. At least I was wearing a suit; I strive for a sense of professionalism. I was sitting in my study, writing badly, just making words on the page, waiting for something good to come through, some sentence I could keep. It was taking longer that day than it usually did, but I didn't mind. The windows were open. I was sort of listening to something by Glazunov; there's a symphony of his you can't listen to with the windows closed, you just can't. Well, I guess you could, but you'd get agitated and run at the walls. Maybe that's just me. My wife was upstairs. Looking at magazines or painting or something, who knows what Daphne does. Hobbies. The symphony in my study was as loud as it could be, but that was nothing new, and she's never complained about all the noise. She doesn't complain about anything I do; she is physically unable to. That's because I fixed her early. I told her in heartfelt tones that one of the reasons I love her is because she never complains. So now of course she doesn't dare complain. Anyway, I'd left the study door open, and Mary slipped in. Without looking up, I smiled gently and murmured, "Hello, honey . . ." I thought she was Daphne. I hadn't seen her in a while, and Daphne was the only other person in the house, as far as I was aware. When she didn't answer, I looked up. Mary Foxe approached my desk with her hand stuck out. She wanted to shake hands. Shake hands! My longabsent muse saunters in for a handshake--I threw my telephone at her. I snatched it off the desk and the socket spat out the wire that connected it to the wall and I hurled the thing. She dodged it neatly. The phone landed on the floor beside my wastepaper can and jangled for a few seconds. I guess it was a halfhearted throw. "Your temper," Mary said. "What's it been--six, seven years?" I asked. She drew up a chair from a corner of the room, picked up my globe, and sat opposite me, spinning oceans around and around on her lap. I watched her and I couldn't think straight. It's the way she moves, the way she looks at you. I guess her English accent helps, too. "Seven years," she agreed. Then she asked me how I'd been. Real casual, like she already knew how I'd answer. "Same as always--in love with you, Mary," I told her. I wished to hell I wouldn't keep telling her that. I don't think it's even true. But whenever she's around I feel as if I should give it a try. I mean, it would be interesting if she believed me. "Really?" she asked. "Really. You're the only girl for me." "The only girl for you," she said, and laughed at the ceiling. "Go ahead and laugh--hurt my feelings . . . what do you care," I said mournfully, enjoying myself. "Oh, your feelings . . . well. Let's go further in, Mr. Fox. Would you love me if I were your husband and you were my wife?" "This is dumb." "Would you, though?" "Well, yes, I could see that working out." "Would you love me if . . . we were both men?" "Uh . . . I guess so." "If we were both women?" "Sure." "If I were a witch?" "You're enchanting enough as it is." "If you were my mother?" "No more," I said. "I'm crazy about you, okay?" "Oh, you don't love me," Mary said. She undid the collar of her dress and bared her neck. "You love that," she said. She unbuttoned further and cupped her breasts. She pushed her skirt up past the knees, past the thighs, higher, and we both looked at her smoothness, her softness, her lace frills. "You love that," she said. I nodded. "This is all you love," she said, pulling her own hair, slapping her own face. If it wasn't for the serenity in her eyes I would've thought she'd lost her mind. I stood up, to stop her, but the second I did, she stopped of her own accord. "I don't want you like this. You have to change," she said. The symphony ended, and I went to the Victrola and started it up again. "I have to change? You mean you want to hear me say I love you for your"--I allowed myself to smirk--"soul?" "It's nothing to do with that. You simply have to change. You're a villain." I waited a moment, to see if she was serious and whether she had anything to add. She was, and she didn't. She stared at me--really came on with the frost, like she hated me. I whistled. "A villain, you say. Is that so? I'm at church nearly every Sunday, Mary. I slip beggars change. I pay my taxes. And every Christmas I send a check to my mother's favourite charity. Where's the villainy in that? Nowhere, that's where." My study door was still open, and I began listening out for my wife. Mary rearranged her clothes so that she looked respectable. There was a brief but heavy silence, which Mary broke by saying, "You kill women. You're a serial killer. Can you grasp that?" Of all the-- I hadn't seen that one coming. She walked up to my desk and picked up one of my notepads, read a few lines to herself. "Can you tell me why it's necessary for Roberta to saw off a hand and a foot and bleed to death at the church altar?" She flipped through a couple more pages. "Especially given that this other story ends with Louise falling to the ground riddled with bullets, the mountain rebels having mistaken her for her traitorous brother. And must Mrs. McGuire hang herself from a door handle because she's so afraid of what Mr. McGuire will do when he gets home and finds out that she's burnt dinner? From a door handle? Really, Mr. Fox?" I found myself grinning--the complete opposite of what I wanted my face to do. Scornful and stern, I told my face. Scornful and stern. Not sheepish . . . "You have no sense of humour, Mary," I said. "You're right," she said. "I don't." I tried again: "It's ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction. It's not real. I mean, come on. It's all just a lot of games." Mary twirled a strand of hair around her finger. "Oh . . . how does it go . . . We dream, it is good we are dreaming. It would hurt us, were we awake. But since it is playing, kill us. And--we are playing--shriek . . ." "Couldn't have said it better myself." "What would you do for me?" she asked. I studied her, and she seemed perfectly serious. She was making an offer. "Slay a dragon. Ten dragons. Anything," I said. She smiled. "I'm glad you're playing along. It's a good sign." "It is? Okay. By the way, what exactly is it we're talking about?" "Just be flexible," she said. I seemed to have accepted some challenge. Only I had no idea what it was. "I'll keep that in mind. When do we start this thing?" She drew closer. "Presently. Scared?" "Me? No." The crazy thing is, I actually did have the jitters, just a little. Suddenly her hand was on my neck. The gesture was tender, which, coming from her, worried me even more. My hand covered hers--I was trying, I think, to get free. "Ready?" she said. "Now--" Excerpted from Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
