The Idle Book Club 16: Mr. Fox

[Argobot]

The Idle Book Club 16:

Mr. Fox

This month, the Idle Book Club discusses Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox, a 2011 book that blurs the line between novel and short story collection. Join us, as Sarah offers her reactions and Chris offers his confusion!

For next month, we'll be reading The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, followed by Runaway by Alice Munro.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

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[TychoCelchuuu]

I am a couple hundred pages into this book and it is awesome. That is all.

[marginalgloss]

I finished this on the way to work this morning. I suspect this one is going to prove divisive! 

 

It’s not quite my first experience with Helen Oyeyemi — I read her book ‘White is for Witching’ years ago, probably not long after its release in 2009. I was attracted by the promise of a decent modern ghost story, but I think it left me somewhat disappointed; the writing wasn’t without interest, and it was certainly imaginative, but it seemed to be lacking any firm hooks on which to hang its narrative* insight. I couldn’t write the vaguest summary now of what it was about. I think 'Mr Fox' is more successful, but it has some of the same problems.

 

I felt lukewarm about this book while reading it at first, then I felt better as it went on; by the end I felt it had lost most of its momentum; but writing about it now, I’m starting to like it again. Flicking back through it again as I write this, I think it would certainly benefit from re-reading.

 

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Oddly, the first thing I was reminded of was Woody Allen. This might have something to do with that somewhat awkward 1930s setting — snappy American dialogue cribbed from the likes of ‘His Girl Friday’ or ‘Bringing Up Baby’ — combined with philosophical metafiction that echoes dreamlike, expressionistic mid-century European writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz. You find this kind of thing in Allen’s prose a lot, and sometimes in his movies too, even if they’re generally more grounded in the real world. ‘Crimes and Misdemeanours’ springs to mind in offering that the same sense of bleary, sordid, unpleasantness we find in ‘Mr Fox’. But there’s goofy metaphysical jokes here too; I mean, you could read this in Woody Allen's voice:

 

‘…On Saturday afternoon I stood paralysed on the pavement outside the restaurant, which had these smart black-and-silver revolving doors; every time someone stepped into them I knew I was meant to take the next empty space and push myself into the lobby. But when I finally did I found that I couldn’t stop pushing at the door until I had spun back out into the street again. I tried to be firm with myself, but with each glimpse of the restaurant full of marble and women genteelly eating salad, I lost my nerve to join them and ran inside the doors like a rodent in a glass maze.’

 

It’s a book of dreams, and a book about how we reconcile those dreams with reality. And when I write ‘we’ I am invoking the Royal We in the way that a writer like SJ Fox puts himself at the centre of his own world. He channels himself through Mary, apparently his muse, but he doesn’t understand her work. He suffers himself through Daphne, his wife. The stories — whoever is writing them, or dreaming them — are probably the best parts of this book. You could argue, if you were being generous, that they come out of his unconscious attempts to reconcile his unhappiness, perhaps even the trauma of the war, with the glib and shallow world of the 1930s, and the violent pulp fiction he’s forced to write to get by.

 

‘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…’

 

It’s also a book about violence against women. For me, the most lingering motif here is that image from ‘the training at madame de silentio’s’ where the two boys, Charles and Charlie, find the man

in chains at the bottom of a lake, a mask locked over his face. Of course they set him free, for reasons they don’t quite understand, and he goes on a killing spree: ‘…Forty women gone between 2:30 and 4 a.m., and he went quickly on throughout the country, doing more…A bad week in time, an awful week of red shivers…’ . 

 

The moral of this fable hardly needs much spelling out: men have a propensity to murder within them, which must be constrained and kept hidden by the demands that society places on us. At this school, young men sleep under iron headboards where lions lie down with lambs, and if they wake screaming in the night they’re pacified by warm milk laced with a ‘special bittersweet medicine’. And later, Charles and Charlie end up similarly masked by their wives; a bleak state of affairs, but perhaps one preferable to the alternative. Mary sets out in bald terms how this vision of male violence contrasts with SJ’s world of schlocky slaughter: 

 

‘…What you’re doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, “Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,” and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door, it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work, it was because she was irritating and stupid, it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him, it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense, it was because “nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman”, it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.’ 

 

This might be the closest this novel has to a thesis. But I wonder if, in the end, the book has anything to say about violence against women beyond this (entirely apt) summation of its media portrayal. Does it actually add to our understanding to render murder in the language of dreams, where culpability is liquid and motivation is only as relevant as desire? To accept that we are all subject to awful impulses from time to time is one thing, but it tells us nothing about what makes a person act on such feelings in the first place. Most of us have no Charles and Charlie waiting in the wings to free us from our human bondage. 

 

Somebody once wrote something rather mean-spirited about the writer Angela Carter. I don’t recall the exact wording, but it went something like: no matter how much they tried, they (the critic) could never shake the sense they were reading ‘Angela Carter, Writer in Residence,’ above everything else. And I think I feel much the same about ‘Mr Fox’. It’s a book which is easy and rewarding to think about, but difficult to love. It takes its cues from fairytales, but it puts thematic interest ahead of storytelling. The structure of nested fragments adds nothing to the whole. For every lovely little bit of writing, there’s an overly artful moment that seems condemned to the purgatory of academic interest.

 

 

* - ‘I find it disappointing that you so transparently view your every interaction as a narrative. It is cliche, if you’ll forgive me saying so.’

[Argobot]

Really well put. I agree with a lot of your points, especially the idea of what this book adds beyond the theme that violence against women is bad. I'm really excited to talk about this one.

[gregbrown]

I started out really hating this book but by the end it had subsided to more the throb of a dull headache. The most frustrating part is that the interesting bits—

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Mary and Daphne interacting, going out to dinner

—are both lodged at the very end and quickly abandoned. I found the bulk of the book to be thinly-connected, often onanistic storytelling for storytelling's sake. (Including such bizarre and unnecessary pretenses as having the interbellum author write a story set in the modern day? The fuck?)

 

Everything else is unrevelatory, especially the dropped theme of violence against women. There's something great to be examined in violence against women as not just a structural urge, but also a deeply personal and almost intimate one. That the reasons for killing women are often not reasons but just a pretext, targets of opportunity. But this book says next to nothing about that, just trying the theme on for size before ultimately discarding it. It's a bad book clothed in all the thematic and stylistic finery that get people to take it seriously.

 

me mad

[Argobot]

So I'm reading Oyeyemi's short story collection, which is her most recent work, and finding it much better than Mr Fox - and I liked Mr. Fox! She's definitely growing as an author and I think has improved in the span of writing Mr Fox and the short story collection What is Not Yours is Not Yours.

 

Mr Fox is not a bad book, but more of a good book in progress. It's rewarding over a span of two books to see her grow more comfortable in the the topics she wants to write about. I would really recommend it to everyone who came away disappointed in Mr Fox because I think Oyeyemi is an exciting new voice in the literary scene and is worth another read.

[marginalgloss]

Yeah, I think my favourite moments of the book could have been better expressed in the form of a short story, or in a collection of thematically-linked stories. I'd be very curious to read some of those now. 

 

Re: the theme of violence against women, and how the novel does or doesn't develop it, the book actually throws up the same kind of questions for me that I've always had regarding the place where Twin Peaks ended up...

 

(big spoilers to follow! really big!! I mean it!!!)

 

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On one hand, Twin Peaks is a show about the possibility for horrific acts of domestic violence, sexual abuse and murder residing within a comfortable and outwardly normal family environment. But it is also about a man who is possessed by a demon that makes him do those horrible things, and more generally, about the play of supernatural forces on the world at large. And while I've always found the show (and movie) extremely compelling, I've never been entirely at ease with the way it reconciles those two aspects. 

 

To put it another way: does the fact that we know Leland was controlled by BOB absolve him of responsibility? Does it actually tell us anything meaningful about the way an abusive person feels? Is it a convenient authorial workaround to devise motivation based on tropes that go back to the middle ages? 

 

Or, on the other hand, is the possession - and in particular, the implication that it was somehow passed down to Leland from his own upbringing - an metaphor that actually cleaves closer to the reality of domestic abuse than a realistic rendition would allow?

 

I think those are the same basic questions you could pitch at Mr Fox, even if there isn't a single character on which to pin them. 

[osmosisch]

What a strange, frustrating book. From moment to moment I liked the prose well enough, and there's some quite inspired little nuggets in there, like the story of the widow and her daughter in the occupied Middle Eastern country, but overall the structure and vagueness was too much for me. If this book was trying to say something, it was lost on me. The theme of man-on-woman violence went nowhere. The fox aspect went nowhere. The allusions to Mr. Fox's past went nowhere.

[Lechimp]

  On 6/4/2016 at 8:24 PM, osmosisch said:

What a strange, frustrating book. From moment to moment I liked the prose well enough, and there's some quite inspired little nuggets in there, like the story of the widow and her daughter in the occupied Middle Eastern country, but overall the structure and vagueness was too much for me. If this book was trying to say something, it was lost on me. The theme of man-on-woman violence went nowhere. The fox aspect went nowhere. The allusions to Mr. Fox's past went nowhere.

 

This is kind of how I felt about it too. I feel like maybe I just didn't completely get what the book was saying and will have to reread the book again some point in the future. But it's encouraging that her short stories are apparently better because she's a good writer and I enjoyed her prose, I just had a hard time following along with this book at points.

[Vulpes Absurda]

I almost read this a few years ago but I started reading the earthsea books instead. But now that I've slowly been reading through the numerous Reynard stories that now would be a good time to give this a go.

 

EDIT: For some reason I thought this was the book to read for this month not the newest episode to come out. Whatever I'll still pick it up before listening. Though at $12.99 for the kindle version I might hit up a used bookstore.

[Chris]

Episode is up!

[WickedCestus]

I liked your discussion of this book! I found it such a hard book to think about, since I liked the beginning and ending sections a lot, but found the stories generally inconsistent. I thought the style was great, but I would've liked more focus on the main characters.

 

Chris, I understand your wariness to present initial opinions that you might not be 100% sure on, but I think the discussion is better when you guys stick to a claim or idea and hash it out together. Being too wishy-washy on your thoughts leads to certain topics falling dead before leading to any actual discussion. I actually thought some of your ideas were quite interesting, or at least decent prompts for discussion, but you seemed to give up on a few of them before even finishing the thought. I think you guys did well considering the strangeness of the book, but just something to watch out for.

 

Anyway, love the pod! None of these books so far have been on my radar at all, and it's really nice to be pulled out of my comfort zone. 

[Alastair]

In recent years, I've shifted from a book-as-a-sacred-object-style reader to the kind who lovingly vandalises everything with pencil annotations. To be honest, it comes from a worry that words will just wash over me. As such, no good passage can be allowed to pass without a cursory mark; a bracket or scrawl to remind Future Alastair: this is something you once feared forgetting.

 

I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself doing this with Mr. Fox as much as any "great" book - long after deciding this wasn't my kind of novel at all. Sentence to sentence, story to story, so many individual components felt immensely satisfying in isolation. That initial frustration broadened into a much stranger spectrum of feelings, not all of them readily identifiable.

 

And as much as I disliked the meta-structure at first, it somehow softened the sharpness of each transition. Jumping between stories gradually felt less jarring to me than it would have in a traditional short story compilation. At times this felt less than the sum of its parts; I'm increasingly convinced it was more. Either way, those parts were very lovely, and Oyeyemi has left an imprint only a talented author can leave.

 

Thank you for choosing this very odd book. I'm glad to have read it. :-)

 

 

Edit: It's a little disorienting to realise just now Helen Oyeyemi is my age. It makes Sarah's recommendation of her new story collection all the more appealing; I think of my personal changes between 27 and 31 and wonder just how different a woman she is now. All authors mature and change as human beings, of course, but the same-age thing just put it into a suddenly-very-real perspective; one that wasn't quite there for me until now.