“Fox. Socks. Box. Knox. Knox in box. Fox in socks.” These five words—ten, if you count the duplicates—are at once a distillation of modernist postulates and a radical critique of power, education, money, and patriarchy: a herald of the self-undermining (not to say postmodern) goals that forward-thinking writers (or so we are often told) pursue today.

“The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of ­combination.” This somewhat opaque declaration from Roman Jakobson, often thrown overhand at students who ask what makes a poem a poem, means, more or less, that poems assemble their unities not so much by meaning as by sound. And so Fox in Socks does, placing sonority over sense and the acoustic properties of words over their ability to refer, pursuing the play of the sign yet arguing, almost grimly, for the impossibility of free play. “I can’t blab such blibber blubber!” Knox says back to Fox. “My tongue isn’t made of rubber.”

As we mouth his refusals, we ourselves conform: we, readers of books aloud, have pronounced exactly the tongue-tying utterance that Knox declares himself unable, or unwilling, to say. Emphasizing the feel of phonemes in a hindered mouth, Fox in Socks thus becomes at once a lesson and a parody of lessons, a demonstration of mastery (“Take it slowly. This book is dangerous!”) and a parody of all institutional power relations, especially those fostered by progressive education. Fox expects (or pretends to expect) not only that Knox will learn to chew goo, but that Knox will “choose to chew goo, too.” Knox must want to learn (so Fox keeps thinking), must want “another game to play.” When Knox exclaims, “I hate this game,” he does not deter Fox; no wonder that Knox must then devise a refusal that appears as incapacity: “Mr. Fox, sir, I won’t do it. / I can’t say it. I won’t chew it.”

Fox is at once the childlike trickster, the American English–speaking coyote who will sew up the boxes himself in order to make the prank succeed (see the gloating fox holding a needle on page 27) and the blustering adult authority, master of ticks and clocks, who thinks (erroneously) that he can make his student do anything. “That’s not easy, Mr. Fox, sir.” Making its Fox a male master, Fox in Socks leaves Knox looking ambiguously gendered—note...