Book review | The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

The children of artists can have it rough: There’s pressure to make your own mark, and your parents may be lost in their own worlds of invention. But for Annie and Buster Fang, whose parents, Caleb and Camille, are conceptual performance artists, the problem is that they get dragged into their parents’ world too often. In one public art display, for instance, Buster is prodded to eat liver throughout a tense dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When he finally vomits the liver back onto the table, horrifying the fellow guests, his parents whisk him out of there, congratulating him on his performance.

In Wilson’s debut novel, tales like these resonate from the past, as Annie and Buster have become their own addled adults. Annie’s a failed actress and Buster a doomed journalist, and they both end up back home again, their parents proclaiming it part of yet another performance.

Tucked inside here is—surprisingly—an astute critique of Internet culture. As social media turns identities into personas with a few clicks, and various forms of reality entertainment blur the line between celebrity and schlubrity, it’s increasingly difficult not to view workaday life as a type of performance. And though the psychic effects of all that are more subtle than what Wilson puts Annie and Buster through, the critique is no less cogent for being slightly over-the-top. Wilson’s wheelhouse is whimsy, and as in his story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, his characters’ quirks are both metaphors for and products of various larger maladies.