Fox

The private schools where Fox teaches are elite spaces where parents send their children, at great expense, on the expectation that they will be better cared for than they would be at a public school. Ironically, Fox uses precisely this expectation of safety to hide his predatory behavior. The novel points out how often and easily someone might manipulate institutions whose continued viability depends on reputation. Because these schools can only survive if wealthy parents view them as safe, Fox is easily able to convince school leadership to help him erase the evidence of his crimes. Similar stories have repeatedly played out in the real world as institutions have prioritized their reputations over the safety of their communities. 

Most famously, a series of scandals unfolded within the Roman Catholic Church in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as allegations of sexual abuse emerged against priests and other leadership figures within the Church. In several cases, Church leaders were found to have shuffled abusers from one diocese to another without removing them from their roles or allowing the accusations against them to come to light, exactly as happens with Fox’s teaching career in Oates’s novel. As just one example, the Chilean priest Fernando Karadima was removed from the clergy in 2010 for sexual abuse of minors, but credible accusations had been made against him as far back as 1984. It took the Church almost 30 years to act.

In recent years, two prestigious Los Angeles universities were found to have covered up sexual abuse by male gynecologists on their staff. In 2019, University of Southern California (USC) gynecologist George Tyndall was charged with 35 felony counts of sexual abuse against patients. Complaints against him had been registered with the university as far back as 1991. He died while awaiting trial. The university was later ordered to pay over $1 billion in settlements to patients harmed by his abusive practice, and the university president, C.L. Max Nikias, resigned under pressure. Just four years later, in 2021, University of California Los Angeles gynecologist James Heaps was sentenced to 11 years in prison for serial sexual abuse of women in his care. As in the USC case, the University of California system was accused of covering up years of credible allegations, and in a civil suit, the University of California system was ordered to pay nearly $700 million to compensate survivors. 

The instinct among institutional leaders to protect the institution’s reputation means that crimes like Fox’s go unnoticed or are “passed off” to the next institution. For Fox, this starts with his graduate school, when he is removed from the English literature program for plagiarism. Rather than risking Fox going public or suing for an unsubstantiated complaint, the institution lets him transfer into another program and earn a degree. Fox finds that he doesn’t need to fix his behavior, just switch locations. The cycle then repeats from school to school. Fox works as a parasite, jumping from host to host, making sure that he can feed. Oates’s narrative points out that, as long as the system’s priority is to save itself, protecting endowments and reputations, men like Fox will play the system for what it’s worth.