The Family Fang: A Novel [Paperback]

Kevin Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 17, 2012

“The Family Fang is a comedy, a tragedy, and a tour-de-force examination of what it means to make art and survive your family….The best single word description would be brilliant.”
—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

“It’s The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’d call The Family Fang a guilty pleasure, but it’s too damn smart….A total blast.”
—Hannah Pittard, author of The Fates Will Find Their Way

Owen King (We’re All in This Together) calls author Kevin Wilson, “the unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers.” With his novel, The Family Fang, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth comes through in a BIG way, with a funny, poignant, laugh-and-cry-out-loud (sometimes at the same time) novel about the art of surviving a masterpiece of dysfunction. Meet The Family Fang, an unforgettable collection of demanding, brilliant, and absolutely endearing oddballs whose lives are risky and mischievous performance art. If the writing of Gary Shteyngart, Miranda July, Scarlett Thomas, and Charles Yu excites you, you’ll certainly want to invite this Family into your home.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011: For outré performance artists, Caleb and Camille Fang, everything in life is secondary to art, including their children. Annie and Buster (popularly known as Child A. and Child B.) are the unwilling stars of their parents’ chaotically subversive work. Art is truly a family affair for the Fangs. Years later, their lives in disarray, Annie and Buster reluctantly return home in search of sanctuary—only to be caught up in one last performance. The Family Fang sparkles with Kevin Wilson’s inventive dialogue and wonderfully rendered set-pieces that capture the surreal charm of the Fang’s most notable work. With this brilliant novel, the family Fang is destined to join the families Tenenbaum and Bluth as paragons of high dysfunction.--Shane Hansanuwat --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Wilson's bizarre, mirthful debut novel (after his collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth) traces the genesis of the Fang family, art world darlings who make "strange and memorable things." That is, they instigate and record public chaos. In one piece, "The Portrait of a Lady, 1988," fragile nine-year-old Buster Fang dons a wig and sequined gown to undermine the Little Miss Crimson Clover beauty pageant, though he secretly desires the crown himself. In "A Modest Proposal, July 1988," Buster and his older sister, Annie, watch their father, Caleb, propose to mother, Camille, over an airliner's intercom and get turned down (" plane crash would have been welcomed to avoid the embarrassment of what had happened"). Over the years, more projects consume Child A and Child B—what art lovers (and their parents) call the children—but it is not until the parents disappear from an interstate rest stop that the lines separating art and life dissolve. Though leavened with humor, the closing chapters still face hard truths about family relationships, which often leave us, like the grown-up Buster and Annie, wondering if we are constructing our own lives, or merely taking part in others'. (Aug.) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; Reprint edition (April 17, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780061579059
• ISBN-13: 978-0061579059
• ASIN: 006157905X
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (133 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared in four volumes of the New Stories from the South: The Year's Best anthology. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of the South.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 55 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "A COMEDY, A TRAGEDY, AND A TOUR-DE-FORCE" IN SPADES August 13, 2011

By Gail Cooke HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

It's such a pleasure when a book catches you totally by surprise....and you're delighted. I had absolutely no idea what to anticipate when THE FAMILY FANG arrived - the title reminded me of the Muensters. Well, yes, the Fangs are certainly an outre family but the plot is nothing short of inventive, spellbinding, and amazing.

Caleb and Camille Fang are performance or conceptual artists who use their two children, Annie and Buster, otherwise known as Child A and Child B, as integral parts of their pieces (think of Buster donning a sparkly gown and wig to win a beauty contest or throwing himself on the floor of a mall and shoving giant handfuls of jelly beans into his mouth when his mother's coat reveals the sweet bounty she has just shoplifted. Or, consider Annie plucking a guitar string and singing along with Buster in pitiful voices as they sit on the street beside a guitar case with a sign in it reading, "Our dog needs an operation. Please help us save him."

To the senior Fangs their art is everything regardless of the toll it may be taking on their children. But eventually the children do grow up and leave home. Each tries to create a life and career for themselves, but are unable to make it work. Left with one choice - to return to their parents' home, Annie and Buster do just that. It begins again with the elder Fangs trying to create performances using their children. But then, quite suddenly, Caleb and Camille vanish at a roadside rest stop. Has something dire happened to them or this just another work of art?

Kevin Wilson has fashioned a wise, witty, fantastic novel, delving into familial relationships, and how actions or non-actions may affect each generation.

- Gail Cooke

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What makes a family? August 13, 2011

By Jill Meyer TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Author Kevin Wilson explores that question in a unique manner in his new novel, "The Family Fang". And the ultimate answer, I suppose, is that a family is whatever combination it wants to be, or DOESN'T want to be.

The Fang Family, mother Camille, father Caleb, and children A (Annie) and B (Buster), are conceptual performance artists who put on their productions in shopping malls in the South. The parents had conceived of their work and then incorporated their children in the acts since birth. In many cases, the parents put their children in physical danger from an early age, all in the name of "artistic license". Leaving a six year old to wander around a mall alone, for instance, doesn't constitute good parenting in my book. But if the Fangs were physically negligent of their two children, they were even more so psychologically. Annie and Buster grew up in a house where nothing was as it seemed and no relationship seemed based on affection - rather based on the childrens' ability to perform in the art acts.

It seems true to me that children growing up with unstable parents in a slap-dash household, often become more mature than the parents who are supposed to be parenting them. This is the case in the Fang family as the children, "A" and "B" as they're known in the art world, mature into adults. But damaged children often grow into damaged adults, as "mature" as they may seem to others looking in - particularly as compared to the parents. As the two children grew up, Annie to become a respected young actress and Buster a novelist of middling success, they find themselves unable to relate in a "normal" relationship. They have each other as support as their parents slip away into their own twosome world.... It is up to Annie and Buster, as they reach their late 20's, to finally find "adult" adulthood.

When I read the reviews of "The Family Fang" and saw the cover art, I imagined it to be a "precious" book, filled with "precious" people doing delightfully "oddball" things. Sort of like "A Taxonomy of Barnacles", a novel by Galt Niederhoffer, published a few years ago. That book was filled with cloyingly cute people and I basically stopped reading midway through and threw the book hard against the wall. "Save me", I screamed, "from 'precious' characters and plot lines!" So I picked up Kevin Wilson's novel with trepidation, figuring the wall could use another gauge, if need be. But, I was pleasantly surprised. His characters WERE, in a way "precious", but in a comfortably interesting way. Some of the characters were likable, some not, but all were presented in a nuanced manner. I honestly could not guess the ending of the book before I was there.

Wilson's book is a wonderful read about interesting people who make interesting decisions about their lives. It's a hard road to adulthood, sometimes, but Annie and Buster are up to the challenge. And so's the reader. Read more ›

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing novel! August 15, 2011

By wibblywobbly

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I first read about this book in a magazine review. Usually I don't actually go out and buy the books I hear about from reviews but I knew I had to read The Family Fang as soon as possible. This book is simply amazing. I got so wrapped up in the characters' lives that I didn't want it to end. Annie and Buster are both fully realized characters that make this book extremely enjoyable. There were parts that reminded me a lot of Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger. After finishing the book, I was left asking myself question and analyzing themes. Reading this book was a wonderful experience and I will definitely be recommending it to others.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tangled Up In Black And Blue August 12, 2011

By Robert Taylor Brewer

Format:Hardcover

It is said there are only two stories in literature: the courage of men and the charm of women. Reverse those roles and you pretty much have the milieu of Kevin Wilson's new novel The Family Fang. Annie Fang, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Fang who are about that interesting early on, her pliant paps parading as she marches onto a set design on her way to a topless scene in a B movie, is never more courageous. When brother Buster wins the Little Miss Crimson Clover crown, well, to his mother at least, he's a picture of inveterate graciousness and charm. And later, when the siblings go looking for their missing parents, on page 198 we get: "Annie felt her fingers snap into fists...then she felt Buster's own hand slowly uncurl her fingers until they were straight and steady." Bold courage, quiet charm. Annie also has stout advice for Buster who announces that after getting shot in the face with a potato gun, he's back living with mom and dad. "Get out of there, Buster...you can't stay there...you need to escape," she scolds, and right away we wonder if the kleptomaniac routine Mrs. Fang put on when the book opened doesn't leave room for a more lurid encore later. It does.

And what of family versus art which was all over the pre publicity blurbs? An ethereal issue at best. The story line is stashed away in Annie and Buster's sibling relationship and its fun digging this out because there is enough literary art and gamesmanship to keep English majors (and former English majors) happy. Herman Melville gets prominent play, especially the first line of his white whale tale.... George Plimpton, he of the multi-variegated career that included a stint as quarterback for the Detroit Lions which he parlayed into a gig with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of maestro Leonard Bernstein, all the while serving as editor of The Paris Review, puts in an appearance as a reader of an audio book featuring characters all of whom Annie "would like to punch in the mouth."

It should be clear Annie is the star here. Her common sense and straight talk over rides everything, and you will forgive her one lapse: sleeping with an editor for Esquire magazine - it wasn't her fault the guy paraded the room in purple jockey shorts. And she doesn't repeat her mistake with semi/ex/sometime/boyfriend Daniel who wants to take her to Wyoming and work on a film script about Nazi Dinosaurs. So if you lose your way in the plot, or bold jabs at popular culture (Sally Mann, too exploitative) seek her out because she can and will extricate any reader from the novel as culture shock ideology that sometimes gets foisted upon us. She's pretty good company. Read more ›