Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
325 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 5 to January 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When I feel that I have a handle on interpreting a book by Helen Oyeyemi, I probably must have missed something, some three-layers-deep allegory the shape of which I would never discern in a dozen readings. Of all the books I've read by Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox seems -- at least from my superficial level of understanding -- the most straightforward, a novel-length essay on the phenomenon of "Women in Refrigerators" and the ways in which cultural gender norms and fiction reinforce each other as a system for controlling and minimizing women. Invoking the folklore of Reynardine and Blackbeard, Oyeyemi builds a thorough picture of the literary and cultural conceit that men are the heroes and actors of the world, and women merely prizes, obstacles, provocations, inscrutable harridans, objects to be won or discarded as necessary.
Writer St. John Fox rewards women in his stories with "meaningful" deaths -- which his creation and muse Mary Foxe seeks to correct with a game. They take turns putting themselves through various stories, St. John consistently pushing the heroine into a tragic demise while Mary grows frustrated with his inability to see what this means, how this plays out in cultural norms. The "game" is left without resolution as Mr. Fox shifts focus, becoming more about St. John's wife Daphne and St. John's tendency to see her as a woman in one of his stories: useful when malleable, disposable when uppity.
In addition to being thematically so straightforward, Mr. Fox also has the plainest, least-adorned language of any Oyeyemi novel I've read to date. Her prose here is still vigorous and lovely, but it lacks the vertiginous, under-the-skin creeping quality I've come to associate with her work. Perhaps this book is a good starting point for anyone thinking to get into her oeuvre -- Mr. Fox has the advantage of carrying none of the probably-transphobic baggage of, say, Boy, Snow, Bird. As a fourth novel, however, it felt somewhat lacking in ambition. Or maybe I just missed a few things.
No comments:
Post a Comment