The Family Fang
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A unique and very funny novel in which art imitates life and life imitates art, in the most mysterious ways
"Great art is difficult" - that's the motto of the Family Fang. What's even more difficult is being raised by great artists. Just ask Buster and Annie, who spent their childhood starring in their parents' madcap performance art pieces. After all, when your art lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise a normal family. Now that Buster and Annie have grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it a struggle to adjust to life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.
But when the lives they've built come crashing down, they have nowhere left to go but home, where their parents plan for one last performance that is to be their magnum opus, whether the kids agree to participate or not. It's their most ambitious project yet, and it brings the Fangs to the difficult decision about what's ultimately more important: their family or their art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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'.
