Book Report Friday: The Family Fang

I’ve been reading a lot of books for my historiography class lately. Which means that I spend most of my reading time with my nose buried in dry texts about ancient historians or attempting to keep up with the stack of New Yorkers that has been steadily piling up at our house. Which might be one of the reasons that I found The Family Fang: A Novel to be so utterly charming. It was like a breath of fresh air in my otherwise stodgy library.

(Not that I don’t loooove the New Yorker, but when you get to about a month behind in your reading, it does tend to induce a slight sense of panic until you come to your senses, cut your losses and toss the oldest issues into the recycling bin).

(I also love my historiography class, but it’s not exactly the sort of reading that keeps you up all night because you can’t put it down. Unless you have class the next day, in which case it might be time to put another pot of coffee on).

The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson, is about a family of performance artists. Most of their art centers around the children, Annie and Buster (artistically known as Child A and Child B), but it also involves the parents, Caleb and Camille, who are the real brains behind the operation. Caleb and Camille’s art revolves around disrupting the flow of everyday life and creating chaos. They cause scenes at malls and on planes. The Family Fang is the original flash mob.

The book ping pongs back and forth between different performance pieces and the present time, where Annie and Buster are all grown up, and pretty messed up from their childhood. Normally, I’m a little too OCD to appreciate an asynchronous timeline (not only does the story go back and forth from childhood to adulthood, the childhood scenes are all out of order), but this book handles the changing times seamlessly and effortlessly.

I liked the Family Fang, because the characters are quirky but relate-able (maybe this says more about my own personality than it does about the book) and Wilson walks a fine but steady line between wacky hijinks and acknowledging the reality that wacky hijinks have messed Buster and Annie up. It’s the sort of book that you would like if you’re a fan of Wes Anderson movies.

I enjoyed the Family Fang so much, I finished reading and immediately looked up the author, Kevin Wilson, because I wanted to read more of his books. I downloaded his collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, which is charming but not as well fleshed out as his novel. Character development seems to be one of his major strengths, which works best in a novel where you have the time to really get to know the protagonists.

At any rate, The Family Fang is a lovely little book. If you’re looking for light reading that isn’t too fluffy, I would highly recommend it.