Mr. Fox - Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi’s amazing first novel, The Icarus Girl, blended African animism with Western psychology to tell the story of an alienated girl and her imaginary playmate. In her rich and startling third novel, the presiding spirits are many, from Ovid to Bluebeard, folktales to Cappelanus. The eponymous Mr. Fox (Riverhead, $25.95) is a writer. His chief creation, Mary Foxe, is also his muse and a personification of love. She wreaks havoc with Mr. Fox’s marriage, but his wife also comes to know and admire her. Together, these three figures make up the central cast of this elusive, shape-shifting fiction, the trio acting out various scenarios of courtship and marriage and generally aspiring to the condition of fairy tales, in which “everybody was in disguise, or on their way to becoming something else.” Fantastic but not whimsical, Oyeyemi’s narrative is grounded in the reality of human behavior as much as it is in dreams, her mix of magic and realism hewing to the laws of fairy tales which decree that “love could not prevail if the order of the tale didn’t wish it, and neither could hatred, nor grief, nor cunning.”
