Mr. Fox Review

This week's novel is Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi.  This was recommended to me, again, by my friend Eric.  So thanks, Eric!

Mr. Fox is a novelist in a marriage that is fizzling out, when Mary Foxe, a kind of muse who is a figment of his imagination and with whom he's infatuated, walks back into his life to tell him that he is a monster and his novels are monstrous, namely because he keeps murdering his female characters.  Interspersed with this narrative are the beginnings of stories that maybe Mr. Fox wrote (that's not definite, but that's the impression I got), most of which star himself and Mary with some cameos from his wife (who is usually dead).

This was a great book.  It had depth and the structure was deft and impressive.  The shorter stories are all unfinished (until the very end of the novel), just as Mr. Fox doesn't know how his situation with Mary or with his wife is going to end.  Is he going to change his ways and become a more loving, caring person, or is his avatar in the story going to murder Mary after several other female characters have been tortured for no real reason other than to make it gritty?  And on that point, this novel says so much about violence against women in fiction without ever going on a diatribe about it.  In the first few pages, Mary tells him, "You kill women.  You're a serial killer  Can you grasp that?" And that's all that's said of it directly.  But it sets it up so that everything that follows is evidence of Mr. Fox (as a writer) killing women (characters).  The reader is looking for it: if the women die more frequently than men, if they die with purpose, and it becomes clear that he's enacting some internal misogyny in his writing if not in the real world.  (But also in the real world.)  So you could say that the whole book is about pointing out the prevalence of these tropes in fiction and about how one instance is fluke but eight of them is a pattern.  But since none of that is spelled out, it may just be my interpretation.

But let me tell you about fairy tales.

Several of the smaller stories have the feel of a fairytale, which was unusual considering that several of them were contemporary (or at least, not set in a vague "long ago").  When I say that they felt like fairy tales, I don't mean they were retellings of well known fairy tales in a contemporary setting, I mean that they had a fairy tale's typical flatness and magical realism.

Dr. Lustucru's wife was not particularly talkative.  But he beheaded her anyway, thinking to himself that he could replace her head when he wished for her to speak...After a week or so old Lustucru got around to thinking that he missed his wife.  No one to warm his slippers, etc.  In the nursery he replaced his wife's head, but of course it wouldn't stay on just like that.  He reached for a suture kit.  No need.  The body put its hands up and held the head on at the neck.  The wife's eyes blinked and the wife's mouth spoke: "Do you think there will be another war?  After the widespread damage of the Great War, it is very unlikely.  Do you think there will be another war?  After the widespread damage of the Great War, it is very unlikely.  Do you think..." And so on.
Disturbed by this, the doctor tried to remove his wife's head again.  But the body was having none of it and hung on pretty grimly.

This section feels flat, by which I mean that it's a lot of summary and the shocking moments are presented in a deadpan manner that makes them ordinary.  Of course she could talk when her head was put back on.  Sure.  It also relies on architypes instead of flushing out the characters.  Dr. Lustucru is a crazy doctor and his wife is his wife.  The reader fills in the rest.  When the story is over, we can go back and shiver at the beheading.  We can muse on how the wife must have felt, why she's stuck in a loop about the war, what her characterization must have been for her to be both a non-caracter from Dr. Lustucru's point of view, someone he can put away and then make speak at will, and a woman whose dead hands clutch at her dead head and cling to her last, chilling words.  There's a lot going on here, but non of it is unpacked for us.

In contrast to some of the other stories told by Mr. Fox, which feel less like fairy tales.  In those, we are placed in a scene and we get dialogue and reaction and intersection.  There's a kind of depth, a flushing out of things, almost like it's been unpacked for us.  And at it's heart, this is what makes a fairy tale.  Because of their flatness, they're open to interpretation.  In a lot of fairy tale retellings, the writer has interpreted it and is presenting us with their interpretation.  They've done the unpacking and removed the flatness from the tale.  So my question is: Do those still count as fairy tales?  Is a fairy tale about the plot points or is it about the form?  Lately, I've been leaning towards thinking it's the form.

***

Next week: Geekerella, a retelling of Cinderella at a Sc-Fi convention by Ashley Poston.