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New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates's strongest and most unsparing novel yet--an always engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls join a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them. Here is the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of male oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire: its guiding spirit, its burning core. At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel--charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion. Amid scenes of violence and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the Foxfire girls together. Foxfire reaffirms Joyce Carol Oates's place at the very summit of American writing.… (more)
User reviews
This has been true as far back as Maenads, the mad female followers of Dionysus whose anger was wrapped up with their sexuality. They were mad because they rejected the role of woman as wife and mother and instead pursued sexual pleasure -- some of the worst things women can do in a patriarchal society. These were the classical women in a frenzy. We see this today, too -- have you ever seen the show Snapped or wondered why society is so much more fascinated by female serial killers than male? Foxfire presents the 1950s incarnation of this idea.
From the beginning of Foxfire, women's anger and sexuality come closely intertwined. In chapter five, just forty pages into my copy, the girls undertake an orgiastic initiation ceremony replete with shirts being torn off, exposed breasts, passionate kisses, even smearing blood on each other and licking it off. Lots of breasts, lots of licking.
This is not a thing that women do to each other in real life. It hardly seems like something written by a woman; it seems like the kind of sleepover fantasy a perverted man who knows nothing about teenage girls would envision. And it's titillating. The point of the scene is not to express women's solidarity with each other but to titillate, that cross between eroticism and fear that women in a frenzy inspires.
There's a strange strand to this book that I wasn't sure how to interpret. The book simultaneously glamorizes and warns against women forging their own path. Their gang is forged through an unreal sexual frenzy that of course spells disaster. The Foxfire girls are to be admired, but they are also dangerous. Their gripes against the violence of the men around them are valid, but they are also to blame for their victimization.
It's as though Joyce Carol Oates couldn't decide about feminism: is it good or is it damaging? I wrestled with this question the whole time. And I'll admit that this is colored by the past Oates books I've read, We Were the Mulvaneys and A Fair Maiden, both of which had troubling views of sexual assault and blame. For her, feminism seems to be more a nice jaunt for a teenager or college girl that should be swiftly abandoned in favor of marriage and family. To her, feminism's limit approaches only misandry, so it may be safe to be toyed with but is definitively not safe to adopt long-term. This becomes cartoonishly true toward the end of Foxfire, where all men are declared the enemy and these frenzied women go too far.
Because that's what this is about: WOMEN in a FRENZY who GO TOO FAR. It is not, notably, about the men who sexually assault Rita and Maddy, or attempt to do so; this is seen as morally wrong but somehow expected of men. It is about women who are righteously mad who lose the legitimacy of their anger through their insistence on feminism and communism. Don't these women realize that they can be mad but should eventually just accept their place?
Not recommended.
Several people drew parallels between this book and a play I wrote this spring, which made me curious to read it. I find JCO is very much a hit and miss writer for me (the Blondes are few and far between!), so I didn’t really know what to expect. But this high paced YA book was very much a hit, and the comparison to my play is flattering indeed.
Not really plot-driven, OR character driven, this book is instead thrust forward by a form of restless anger. The episodes told seem almost random, gaps are left, ideas flare up and pass. But the picture painted of a small town in America in the fifties, with any amount of dirt hiding just under the surface, and the girls who suddenly refuse to waddle in that dirt, is a punch in the guts of a book, engrossing, fast, intoxicating.
The ending is over the top, perhaps, and rather unlikely, but in it’s context it works. I’m with Legs, Monkey, Boom-Boom and the rest of them to the very end, and am sorry to let go.