Helen Oyeyemi and the Borderlands of Realism

Here’s one way to start talking about Helen Oyeyemi: For many years, I taught her 2011 novel Mr. Fox to undergrads in an intro-to-fiction class, lecturing with bravado about its narrative manipulations but disconcertingly uncertain that I’d fully got it. In this novel about writing novels, a fictional character is conjured into life, intervening in the very life of her creator, only to become a writer herself. For most readers, this leaves them wondering who or what is real in the world of the book, blurring the lines between writers, characters, and readers. This was the case for me as well. My students would ask question after question about the novel as though I could answer them in a definitive way, trusting that I understood the text with some comprehensive authority. Yet I, too, had a lot of questions. By the last time I taught the book, I had read myself into a knot, feeling sure that I’d gleaned something esoteric about its speculations on the violent nature of storytelling while doubting that I understood even the most literal aspects of the plot. The uncertainty created by the novel, however, was what drew me to it and why I liked teaching it.