Celestial Timepiece

By Joyce Carol Oates

New York: Hogarth, 2025
672 Pages

A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by the legendary author “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine)

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.

Quote

“Mystery is the ‘genre’ that most closely expresses our relationship with the world, especially the world of adults when we are children or young adolescents,” says Oates of FOX.

“It is a vision of life, a methodology of examination, that never fails to excite me as a writer for whom the world is indeed mysterious and unfathomably beckoning.” — Joyce Carol Oates  @hogarthbooks instagram

Contents

Prologue

Part I: Wieland Waterlands

• The Trophy
• 30 October 2013
• 31 October 2013

Part II: Tongue

• Mr. Tongue
• The Trophy

Part III: Disaster

• Hindenburg Disaster
• Breaking News
• Detective Z.
• Little Kitten, Waiting
• Atlantic County Evening News
• The Wraith

Part IV: “Nevermore”

• Bar Harbor, Maine: Exile
• Quakerbridge, Pennsylvania: The Handshake

Part V: The HIre

• The Langhorne Academy
• The New Life
• One Dozen Roses

Part VI: A New Life

• A Fox at the Langhorne Academy
• Part VII: IN Belial’s Grip
• The Return
• Womanspeak
• Soul-Mate
• Dirty Girl
• Custodian, Haven Hall
• Happy Birthday!
• The Raptor’s Eye
• The Request
• Nocturnal
• Absence
• Destiny: A Knock on a Door

Part VIII: The Investigation

• Wet-Whiskered Kiss
• Sleeping Beauties 2013
• The Detective. The Guilty Party.
• Wreckage
• Feather Bracelet (1)
• Feather Bracelet (2)
• The Prayer
• “Bad Daddy”
• “Good Daddy”
• “A Wrong Key”
• “Little KItten”
• “Scene of the Crime”
• In the Ravine
• Good-Luck Piece
• The Confession
• “The Other Side”
• A Walk in Hell
• The Covenant

Epilogue

• Mystery-Journal: 1
• Mystery-Journal: 2
• Mystery-Journal: 3
• Mystery-Journal: 4
• Mystery-Journal: 5

Reviews

Heather Scott Partington, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2025

The allusive nature of “Fox” and its twist ending shows how greatness that comes from awfulness can be inconveniently, unquestioningly good. What do we do with the idea that the worst offenses can also sometimes create art? Readers, consumers and audiences haven’t yet come to peace with that, just like we haven’t come to terms with how to separate art from a monstrous artist. Oates wants us to turn pages and squirm.

Owen King, New York Times, June 17, 2025

Joyce Carol Oates’s impressive and unsettling new novel, “Fox,” concerns the far-reaching damage unleashed by a self-serving sociopath. Francis Harlan Fox, a predatory English teacher at an elite boarding school in southern New Jersey, uses his authority to sexually abuse his adolescent female students, and manipulates everyone around him — his few friends, parents, the school headmistress, the legal system — to create cover. His galactic indifference to other people’s suffering is horrifying yet remarkably engrossing.

Jaqueline Snider, Library Journal, April 2025, page 93

Starred Review. Oates’s latest weaves together a murder mystery, an examination of pedophilia, and an analysis of town-versus-gown tensions. Most saliently, she explores human gullibility and the vulnerability of young girls. Oates digs deeply into her characters; not a student, parent, detective, teacher, or even dog escapes her penetrating gaze. VERDICT Tackling Oates’s lengthy novel feels something like running a marathon, breathless, through a foreboding landscape. She is at her best here: insightful, unrelenting, and devastating.

Carol Haggas, Booklist, May 1/15, 2025, page 50

Starred review. Oates owns the realm of genre-fluid fiction that focuses on the physical and psychological vulnerabilities of young women. Her latest foray explores the disturbing and chilling milieu of pedophilia from the viewpoints of predator and prey, protector and victim, exposing how easily people can be misled and the devastating consequences of misplaced trust. Menacing, mesmerizing, and thoroughly provocative.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2025, page 20

Starred review. Oates continues to explore the dark side in this moody, often shocking mystery….in the end she delivers a tautly wound procedural, elegantly written (and with a Nabokovian in-joke that joins Lolita to her tale), with an expertly constructed surprise ending. It’s not for the squeamish, but Oates once again masterfully limns the worse angels of our nature.