The Family Fang

For the first half of the book, it's a fun and occasionally funny story about an odd and dysfunctional family (who happen to be performance artists). In the second half, however, the tone shifts. The book becomes a rumination on the effects that parents can have on their children, and the events that seemed merely fun are viewed in a new light.

I didn't love everything about it. It has moments that connect emotionally, but a lot of it ended up feeling detached. I think it's worth reading, it's a strange and interesting story.

Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists who use their young children—who they refer to as Child A and Child B—as unwitting accomplices in their staged spectacles. Or are the children really unwitting? The children, Annie and Buster, grow up to be an actor and an author respectively, and we quickly learn both are happy to have flown the coop. But when Buster suffers a horrifying accident while on a writing assignment, Annie and Buster find themselves back at their family home. They resist the artistic pull of their parents' schemes. But when their parents mysteriously disappear, Child A and Child B have to finally wrestle with their emotions and their past.

This is the second novel of Kevin Wilson's I have read, the more recent Nothing to See Here being the other. Both novels put family dynamics on display, although The Family Fang is told in third person rather than first person, pushing the Fang dynamics into more removed, observational territory. And what humorous specimens to observe! Flashbacks are revealed in most chapters to Annie and Buster's childhood when the Fang's high jinxes had the most impact, retelling staged robberies and plays with faux incest, even the earliest event where a young Annie's screams at a Santa mall event causes a ruckus—the initial inspiration for later renegade performances at shopping malls.

The present timeline and the flashbacks reveal the love/hate dynamic the kids have toward their parents—sometimes they despise being a part of the schemes, other times their wayward behavior elicits love and respect from their parents. Their parents' gravitational pull is too strong for them to stay away for too long. But when their parents mysteriously disappear, the kids wonder if they're dead or if it's another performance piece; it wouldn't be too farfetched, they surmise to everyone. The Fang story is funny and touching and strange, creating a unique world that is truly special. It's hard not to cheer for Annie and Buster, unwitting accomplices to their parents' devotion to art, as they are truly talented in their own right, simply living in the shadow of their parents' notoriety.

Wilson's writing is a marvel of economy and wit, paced with dry perfection, funny and endearing in equal measure. My only quibble being what I'll call run-on paragraphs, where several lines of different characters' dialogue occupy a single paragraph without line breaks, leading to some confusion of who is speaking. But it's a minor quibble. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 5 stars.