The Hidden Injuries of Class

Harry Stecopoulos reviews Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel “Fox.”

By Harry StecopoulosJune 21, 2025

• Fiction

Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers for Fox by Joyce Carol Oates.

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LIKE MANY ENGLISH professors these days, I no longer teach Lolita. This novel about sexual assault is too violent, too upsetting for responsible pedagogy. Yes, Nabokov’s 1955 novel warrants respect as one of the great formal achievements of postwar American letters. Few readers can forget the virtuoso opening with its stunning account of the titular name; few readers fail to appreciate the compelling road narrative that structures and propels the plot. But many college students refuse to read a work centered on a pedophile. Why should they endure that sort of triggering experience? Why should they spend hours with Humbert Humbert?

Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel Fox cites Nabokov’s work repeatedly, and for good reason. Like Lolita, Fox focuses on a male pedophilic teacher; like Lolita, Fox is deeply troubling. Indeed, Oates exceeds Nabokov’s scandalous treatment by devoting dozens of pages to thinly veiled accounts of her main character’s criminal acts. These portions of the novel are difficult, sometimes impossible, to take. Some readers of Lolita can intermittently lose themselves in Nabokov’s witty, cutting comments on postwar American culture, but Fox offers no snarky respite from the sexual assaults central to its plot. Oates’s reader must contend with pedophilia and its consequences for almost the entirety of this 649-page novel.

For all that, Fox still deserves serious and widespread attention. Oates has taken a challenging topic and used it as the basis for a small-town mystery of great aesthetic innovation and rich social implications. Formally speaking, this plot-driven narrative of violence and detection showcases her skill at sketching a range of different figures: Francis Harlan Fox, of course, the villainous protagonist, but also his female students and their parents, police detectives, blue-collar townspeople, even a small dog. Oates’s powerfully evocative language proves central to this vibrant characterization. Consider her description of a dying working-class woman’s breath as “smelling like damp pennies in the palm of a hand,” or her account of how attempting to educate an unresponsive female student “was like trying to communicate with uncooked bread dough.” From structure to style, Oates’s novel provides a master class in the aesthetics of fiction.

Her thematic chops are no less impressive. Readers familiar with Oates’s work will hardly be surprised by her interest in difficult narratives of sexual assault. She has often published fiction centered on the vulnerability and abuse of girls and young women—consider the fate of Connie in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (1966), Maureen Wendall in them (1969), and Marianne Mulvaney in We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). But Oates’s fiction has focused equally on how problems of class impact those better-known quasi-gothic themes. Unusually sensitive to material advantage and privation—hardly hot topics among contemporary US novelists—Oates rarely misses an opportunity to explore how a character’s socioeconomic position shapes their behavior and their experience. For her, gender and sexuality are the modalities in which class is lived, and the struggle to survive, let alone thrive, under capitalism often emerges most palpably, most terribly, in the pain inflicted on young female subjects.

Importantly, Oates recognizes that, in the United States, violence against women is hardly confined to working-class contexts. Her National Book Award–winning novel them understands Maureen Wendall’s vulnerability to sexual assault in light of her urban poverty and near-constant exposure to violent men. Her stepfather attacks her, and she later labors as a sex worker on the streets of Detroit. But the bestseller We Were the Mulvaneys takes a different approach. In this novel, Marianne, the daughter of an affluent family, is assaulted by the son of her father’s rich friend. Her attack doesn’t so much confirm as precipitate a crisis in the family’s economic position; as the plot unfolds, the Mulvaneys’ fortunes decline.

Fox also speaks to Oates’s rich awareness of bourgeois culture’s complicity in misogynistic violence, but it does so in a particularly acute manner by focusing on a teacher who sexually assaults his prepubescent female students. Nabokov created, in Humbert Humbert, a rapist acutely responsive to—and critical of—postwar American culture. Oates, however, takes a different tack by inventing, in Fox, a pedophile whose cultural snobbery is less important than his capacity to manipulate and violate his pupils. As this pedagogic emphasis should suggest, Oates recognizes the potential role of elite education in the dynamic she chronicles. Exclusive prep schools and universities groom future corporate kingpins and titans of industry; their hierarchical structure and elitist values also provide the context for sexual abuse.

Unlike Lolita, which only toys with the mystery form, Fox almost immediately affirms its generic status as a whodunit with the discovery of a horribly mutilated body in a smashed car. The appearance of this unidentified corpse emerges, tellingly, in the context of a near-simultaneous acknowledgment of class disparities. Fox signals its interest in social hierarchy from the outset, by introducing us to P. (Paige) Cady, headmistress at New Jersey’s Langhorne Academy, and her cocker spaniel Princess Di, as they stumble upon the novel’s homicide. The presence of the elite Cady, a WASP scion, and her aristocratically named dog immediately alerts readers to a more elusive and difficult mystery: why some Americans believe in their own superiority. Cady, like almost all the faculty and students at Langhorne, including Fox, consider themselves to be of a much higher station than the “barbarian” locals of Wieland and Southern New Jersey. These affluent preppies are educated and cultured, far removed from the “poor whites” who “have failed to thrive in the twenty-first century, left behind by the computerized, high-tech economy.” Blessed with what they understand as breeding and talent, Cady and her peers assume they have little in common with the Jerseyites they view as “brutes.”

As this demonization of the working class should imply, the growing gentrification of Wieland roils the town, differently but no less significantly than the sexual assaults and linked murder destabilize the faculty, students, and parents at Langhorne Academy. Living on family farms that have been sold off, acre by acre, the locals work for but cannot abide the new affluent residents whose children attend the exclusive academy, that “place for rich people.” Gentrification generates construction jobs building “multimillion-dollar houses,” but it also leads to such high property taxes that “people who’ve been living here for generations have had to move out.” The newfound popularity of Wieland produces a crisis for the already hard-pressed older families of the area. No surprise, then, that “anything related to new tech/pharmaceutical executives […] evokes local calumny,” the third-person narrator informs us, a “kind of choked rage among longtime Atlantic County residents.”

The Healys, a working-class family, figure prominently in this class-oriented plot. Early on, Marcus Healy and his brother Demetrius finish dumping waste at the local landfill, their muscles sore, their nostrils assailed. On the way back to town, Marcus expresses his resentment of the rich by destroying the Halloween decorations on the lawns of gentrified homes. Like so many members of his community, he rightfully takes umbrage at the way the new arrivals treat “work-staff” and, more broadly, all of the “poor whites” as vulgar, if not “invisible.” Marcus even threatens to vandalize the Langhorne Academy until Demetrius, his brother, reminds him that their ailing father works there as a custodian. For all their anger, the Healys cannot afford to alienate the rich families and their school. They need the work, whether at the academy itself or in the homes of the wealthy, where they remodel kitchens and bathrooms, inevitably reminding themselves of their lowly position.

The social changes affecting Wieland have the potential to divide working-class families from within. When Mary Ann Healy, Marcus and Demetrius’s cousin, wins a scholarship to the academy, the extended family understandably finds it hard to comprehend a tuition priced at $60,000 a year. More troublingly, they must come to terms with the possibility that this education may transform Mary Ann’s life and set her apart. The academy—and the bourgeois culture it represents—drives working-class families from the town, but the academy also threatens to unmake those families by elevating its more talented offspring into a new social stratum.

Themes of class mobility and class insecurity are integral to Oates’s novel. Francis Fox, the titular pedophile, and Horace Zwender, the senior detective who runs the investigation into the former’s death, both occupy uneasy positions with respect to the town’s social hierarchy. Fox, a newly arrived teacher at the Langhorne Academy, has an ambiguous class status. While we never learn much about his background—indeed, he is the only major character whose origins and family life remain a mystery—Oates emphasizes his ambivalent relationship to the wealthy institutions where he works and the affluent children he teaches. Conscious of the need to exhibit the trappings of wealth and culture, Fox usually assumes the role of a prosperous man of letters, regularly touting the fact that he has won a poetry contest. He has benefited from an Ivy League education—he is a graduate of Columbia Teachers College—and demonstrates cultivated, if somewhat traditional, tastes in literature (Frost), fashion (J. Press blazers), and, more troublingly, art (Balthus).

A charismatic man possessed of good manners, Fox charms virtually all of the women he meets, whether heiresses who work at the Guggenheim Foundation or librarians at Langhorne Academy. He even succeeds in winning over the stubbornly resistant Cady. Yet Oates takes pains to emphasize that Fox, a teacher with no other source of income, subsists on the margins of this elite culture. When spying on a female student at her home, for example, Fox carefully catalogs the signs of wealth and prestige in an envious manner: “Ah, the Chambers house!—impressively large white Colonial [with] five or six bedrooms at least, three-acre landscaped lot. A single vehicle (classy BMW, looks like) in the driveway.” He tries to reassure himself of his right to be in this “sequestered residential neighborhood” by invoking his Acura as “a reasonably new-model upscale car,” but that reference falls flat in the face of the moneyed surroundings.

Throughout the novel, Fox attempts to maintain a class identity that he cannot afford. This burden will occasionally inspire awareness of class hierarchy and economic disparity. Consider, for example, how Fox manifests some mild sympathy for Mary Ann, a working-class student struggling in an elite school. “Francis feels sorry for Mary Ann Healy,” the narrator informs us, “over her head at the swanky school, she will never be accepted by her spoiled-brat classmates as one of them.” Far more disturbingly, Fox expresses his envy of the rich in terms that resonate with his criminal behavior. Early on in the novel, he walks the lavish grounds of the academy and responds with a telling explosion of ressentiment: “Affluence!—Francis Fox’s heart becomes a fist, bitterly he resents the rich. Rich people’s children, his students. He is their Mr. Fox. Hire Fox to fuck your children. Fuck you all, thank you very much.”

Oates hardly encourages us to read Fox’s violations as acts of class resistance; they are horrendous crimes against children. Yet the narrator does make clear that Fox’s sexual assaults are shaped by his hostile relationship to the affluent. Fox understands his assaults on female students as being linked to his animosity toward their rich parents. Fox never commits crimes against scholarship students like Mary Ann or middle-class students like Eunice Pfenning; he only manipulates and assaults girls who are as rich as they are attractive. His envy of their parents drives his perverse lust. That Fox creates a website to sell images of his victims to other pedophiles makes still more manifest the economic implications of his criminal behavior.

Oates likewise stresses the fraught class dimensions of Zwender, the detective whose police work dominates the last half of the novel. Raised in a working-class household, Zwender is a striver who has separated himself from his laborer father and his extended family. “As one who’d educated himself, became a law enforcement officer and now a senior detective,” the narrator informs us, “Zwender looked down upon his fucked-up cousins,” many of whom are in prison or the military. Yet Zwender also dislikes rich snobs like Cady, and the power of his office allows him to voice those sentiments. Over the course of the investigation, the detective forces the aristocratic headmistress to confront the fact that she has hired a pedophile as a teacher, a realization that crushes her. As the narrator puts it, “he has kicked the arrogant female over into the mud […] he has despoiled her pride.” Oates cleverly frames Zwender’s class victory as an erotic conquest, once again emphasizing that problems of economic hierarchy often get played out in terms of gender and sexuality. “The pounding revelations of the last half-hour” have given him “a pleasure that is almost sexual. Possibly it is sexual.” In this twisted scenario, exposing the elite school’s inadvertent facilitation of pedophilia provides the arriviste detective with an affective reward that is as classist as it is libidinal.

Fox concludes with a strange bifurcation as the narrative takes both a blue-collar and an haute-bourgeois turn. Zwender, sensitive to the privations experienced by the Wieland locals, tells Cady he’ll declare the murder an accident and leave the pedophilic crimes undisclosed. Langhorne Academy will retain its fine reputation, and Cady will remain in her job. In return, he convinces the headmistress to provide two of the Healys with less demanding long-term employment. Francis Fox’s crimes against young women have strangely, disturbingly, resulted in a minor economic readjustment.

Or so it seems. For the epilogue to this sprawling novel leaves working-class New Jersey behind for more elite terrain. The final turn of the narrative emerges in a Princeton University creative writing thesis submitted by one of Fox’s former female students to none other than Oates herself. This text, written in the first person, provides us with another perspective on the sexual abuse and murder so pivotal to the plot, but the document also returns us to the same upper-crust institutional circumstances that created the context for Fox’s crimes in the first place. The critique of gentrification and social status evident throughout the novel cannot provide a way out of a capitalist society structured in dominance. Much as the whodunit plot demands a firm sense of closure, so too does Fox insist on the stricture of social containment. Oates ends where she began: in the oligarchic spaces of an exclusive school dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo.