Crystalclear listened to the audio version of Mr. Fox and wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but it’s speculative-leaning and maybe reading the actual book would be a different experience, so she suggested it to me. While I do think it was better to read it than to listen to it (Oyeyemi does a lot with fonts, blank space, and paragraph structures that make way more sense looking at it than listening to it), I also am not totally sure how I felt about Mr. Fox.
The novel felt like it was really a collection of absolutely riveting short stories strung together by a weird narrative in which a writer, Mr. Fox, has made up a muse named Mary Foxe who he essentially kills off in all of his novels. Mr. Fox is married and apparently has a tough time of it (namely, he’s a douche), and his wife is convinced he’s cheating on her with someone named Mary Foxe. The rub is Mary’s not actually real, at least not right away. Mary is a legit figment of Mr. Fox’s imagination that he uses to write his bestsellers. Until one day the figment of Mary rebels. She’s tired of being killed off. She wants to be real and to be respected. So she refuses to cooperate and Mr. Fox can’t find his writing mojo. He strikes a deal with his imaginary girlfriend; they will write stories to each other and if he manages not to murder her in any of them, she’ll comply. So they write, and honestly, the short stories are little perfect gems of glistening prose. I 100% loved the interior stories, and even almost figured out how they fit together (almost).
But I DNFed this book with only 50 pages to go because I just felt like I was too dumb to understand what was going on. I kept waiting and waiting for the threads of everything to come together, and they just never seemed to. Or maybe they did and I was too dumb to notice. But either way, with only 3 chapters to the end, I just didn’t care anymore and life is too short to stick with a book that’s no longer holding your attention.
I felt sad doing it because on a sentence-by-sentence level, this book was over a 5 star rating. The prose is achingly beautiful and I adored several of the short pieces in it. But I mostly felt like the book was purposely convoluted so I couldn’t figure out the point of it all. It was like being in a room where everyone got the joke but me, and I got tired of trying to figure out the punchline.
2 stars because it made me work too hard.
Bingo Square: Minds (for imaginary girlfriends causing marital problems, and it screwing with my brain)