Summer has passed along with it my great summer love of 2026: Joyce Carol Oates. What a woman, what a word, what a mind, what a pleasure to know that her literary output is as expansive as the hot afternoons and that there is no need to look any further.
In early July, my mother called to tell me she had read a book that reminded her of me. “It’s a psychological thriller,” she said, “but there’s something in the descriptions, in the way of detailing it all, of naming it, that reminded me of you, and I think you might like it.” My mother, an avid reader of detective fiction, gave me a few days later Mr. Fox. I started it at the pool in my hometown, a place bathed in trees and shade where I recover the reading pace I had as a teenager.
In the first chapter, Oates places herself in the shoes of a female dog, Lady Di, and from the animal’s perspective narrates a walk during which the creature encounters something that will become pivotal later. As for the rest, I only remember the velocity: it swept me up completely, because the more than seven hundred pages lasted me two afternoons, since I plunged wholeheartedly into this anguished and addictive story from the very opening lines. That’s the luck, and that is why it’s a summer love. Nothing interrupts it.
Oates achieves in this book something I admire: it transcends moral boundaries and dives straight into the psychology of antagonistic characters, repulsive in their behavior, dark and discomforting minds, and it delves into their desires to name them, which is the most challenging part of all. One can only read it and feel that discomfort, wonder what lies inside it to be able to endure that reading, and ask why certain books become addictive even when accepting what they narrate is almost unbearable. Mr. Fox is one of them.
Of course I became obsessed, as one would expect, and devoured The Butcher, another anguishing tale inspired by real events that tells the story of a doctor obsessed with success who subjects numerous vulnerable women to various operations and experiments without consent. When I finished it, I moved on to Mama, an older Oates work in which the protagonist’s mother dies and her daughter discovers another dimension of her.
In Joyce Carol Oates’s books there are two stories: the one she tells and the one underlying, which can become even greater than the first. Now waiting for me at my mother’s house is Mama? No, the next I’ll read is In the Half-Light. The summer ends, but the love remains.