"There was never a time when I was not in love with Mr. Fox. There was never a time when Mr. Fox was not my life." These words are written by Eunice, 13 years old, one of the girls abused by the seductive and perverse Francis Harlan Fox, a charismatic and charming professor who is at the same time a predatory pedophile who uses his position to access his victims, his "little kittens", as he refers to them.
"I wanted to write about an academic community that allows a predator to act with total impunity, without necessarily wanting to know, a kind of denial. Something that I feel is typical of current life. We have politicians in high positions whom the community allows to remain in power, even when it is known that they may be evil or dishonest," explains to La Lectura, smiling and serene through the screen, the writer Joyce Carol Oates (Lockport, New York, 1938), a prolific master of exploring those dark corners of society where we avoid looking or our blindness prevents us from seeing.
Fragile, almost transparent, she lights up when talking about morality, fear, and violence. "The issue of child abuse and exploitation is very relevant in the United States due to the infamous Epstein case and others similar. I wanted to write about a predator and how he manages to get away with it," insists the author who, for the first time in her nearly 60 novels - in addition to other 80 works of essays, theater, poetry, stories, etc. - includes a detective plot. "The idea came to me while hiking in a swamp near my house. I often walk and see American vultures in the sky, very beautiful, flying in circles with a kind of laziness. I thought: What if I followed their trail and found a person's corpse?."
That's exactly how the first pages of Mr. Fox (Alfaguara) are, a hypnotic and absorbing novel, written with relentless precision and full of lies, abuse, and revenge, which raises questions about the environment that has fostered the appearance of such an individual and, at the same time, has been unable to recognize it.
Joyce Carol Oates at her home in Princeton, New Jersey.Oded Balilty / AP Photo
"We seek in fiction, in literature or cinema, a sense of justice against violence and evil that we do not find in reality"
"Most great novels offer a complete view of life, so it is inevitable that they combine beauty and ugliness, the beautiful and the grotesque. That is what I aspire to"
"The U.S. has a long history of pretending to be a moral country, pretending to be a democracy. Today all that has collapsed, and the world is already aware of our miseries and shames"