For someone who has written so many books, Joyce Carol Oates exhibits a notable distrust of the reader. In her latest novel, Fox – a baggy, 650-plus-page monster – she swaddles words in brackets and stresses their meaning with italics, as if convinced that we will not be able to tell a consequential word from a functional one, let alone spot subtext.

The novel opens in late October 2013, a few months after Francis Fox has begun teaching at Langhorne Academy, ‘one of the most selective private schools in the country’, in the village of Wieland. No one realises he has gone missing because it’s half-term and he has no friends. Several characters walk around the ‘pond/small lake’. They notice a rotting smell and turkey vultures circling overhead, but never quite glimpse the English teacher’s body, which is lying next to his white Acura in ‘a (hidden) ravine’. 

P Cady, the headmistress, comes closest: her dog, a ‘terrier-hound’, retrieves a ‘bloodied meat-thing’ (Fox’s tongue), though she tells herself it’s ‘just a deer tongue’. Later, the Healy brothers discover the car and the corpse. News of their ‘GRISLY HALLOWE’EN DISCOVERY’ is splashed across the local papers. It’s the biggest