Now a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Jason Bateman and Christopher Walken. “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 … 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.
more
This was one unusual novel! But, in a field where there is a lot of sameness, it was refreshing. I will forever remember this book and will look for others by the author.
This book is nuts, but really good
It’s hard to not give this 5 stars, but hard to give it considering how quirky, unusually and absurd the novel is. Centering on a family of performance artists, it explores the weirdness of American culture and family life. It’s very funny, but in strange ways, though strange in the appealing sense. The writer creates an entire world and believable characters who somehow function in that world. Great fun and exuberant writing!
Original plot with well-developed, interesting, quirky characters. I found it to be very moving, as well. Really great book!
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.
I made the mistake of seeing the movie version of this book before I read it. It was actually a good movie, but it lacked the punch of the author’s dialogue that I eventually found in the book. Luckily, I read “Nothing To See Here” (which was awesome) and it made me want to read more Kevin Wilson. Fantastic premise, awesome characters, just a great read overall.
Very original and different
A good desertation on how mentally unstable parents can seriously damage the psyche of their children.
I found the book to be tragic with what the parents put their children through in the name of “art.”
Odd and disturbing story of an odd, disturbed family. Creepy.
The author really made you feel bad for the kids in this book. You see how selfishness can effect children. I made my self finish it hoping they would get a good end.
I really did not like some of the characters. I agree with the children, making mischief!
Good summer reading. Hot, headachy, can’t really concentrate on anything of substance, summer reading…
A touch twisted, but this funny, strange family story was ultimately insightful and redemptive!
Very interesting! Different kind of book!
Just plain silly. Not worth my time.
Very strange family. Made me grateful for my normal upbringing. The narcissism of the parents reminded me of someone we all know.
I loved all the surprises and twists and turns in this book. Sometimes it seemed long, but it kept me up many hours past “bedtime.” from Sandra
Only knock on this is the frequent use of the F word
I didn’t get the humour. Darn!