mr. fox. helen oyeyemi. (249)

i decided to pick up helen oyeyemi's mr. fox after it was listed on a flavorpill post about the 50 best fabulist books everyone should read.  flavorpill described it as a "a wandering, meta fairy tale about creativity, inspiration, and the fact that when you chop somebody’s head off in real life, they don’t actually become a prince."  fairy tales and head choppings!  i'm in.

the premise for the book was intriguing, one day mr. fox, an author with a tendencies to kill the females in his works, is invited to play a literary game with his muse, mary.  mary, a voice he created during the war to keep his morale up has evolved into a person.  they take turns creating stories for each other, her goal to have mr. fox fall in love with her and vice versa.  everything is fun and games until mr. fox's real life wife, daphne begins to get involved.

it sounds like a fun read, but i felt lacked execution.  perhaps i focused too much on looking for mr. fox, mary, and daphne in the stories which resulted in my displeasure.  i just did not see any cohesion that constitute it as a novel.  instead,a i think mr. fox would have worked better as a collection of short stories in which the lead characters shared the same name.  there is no denying that oyeyemi is an amazing writer.  i absolutely loved the chapter, "my daughter the racist" which centered around a mother and daughter in a war-torn, taliban-terrorized village in the middle east befriend an american solider much to the outrage of the village.  it's a beautiful story about human connection and tolerance.  i have also i discovered upon googling (to find the actual setting of the book) that it won the BBC national short story award, which is great, but makes me wonder how it fits into the novel.  it really didn't, but it does not make it a bad story, just a bad novel.

the other chapter that i enjoyed was "the training at madame de silentio's" which was the story of two boys, charles wolf and charlie wulf.  they were too mischievous boys that were sent to an academy that which was like a finishing school, turning boys into world-class husbands for wealthy wives.   they were taught things such as: "strong handshakes, silence, rudimentary car mechanics, how to mow the lawn, explosive displays of authority, sports and nutrition against impotence"  i personally enjoy the role reversals here.  

the other chapters though entertaining and well-written did not come together for an outstanding overall novel.  there is no denying oyeyemi's talent, but mr. fox is not her best work.