The Family Fang

By: Kevin Wilson

Narrated by: Therese Plummer

Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief.

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.

When the lives they've built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance - their magnum opus - whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what's ultimately more important: their family or their art.

Filled with Kevin Wilson's endless creativity, vibrant prose, sharp humor, and keen sense of the complex performances that unfold in the relationships of people who love one another, The Family Fang is a masterfully executed tale that is as bizarre as it is touching.

©2011 Kevin Wilson (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"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." (Amazon.com review; Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011)

Beautifully dark

What a wonderful journey through The Fang family. Family is complicated, if you can appreciate that fact, you will love this book. You will plummet down with the f***ed up children and then, with a final twist, end up feeling optimistic. We all know bad endings, but making them good ones is a true art unto itself.

Great story and great performance

Wilson is a wonderful writer and the performer is amazing, really enhancing the story. Highly recommend!

It’s wonderful

I loved this quirky tragically funny book! The author tells a wild story as though it’s a common everyday occurrence. Because in these mountains, things happen. :)

Another good one from Kevin Wilson

Quirky and interesting. A story about a family like non you have met before. I enjoyed it very much.

Kevin Wilson is a genius

As is the pattern with Kevin Wilson, this book draws you into a world inhabited by quirky characters doing improbable things. This would (to me) not normally be a good thing, but in Wilson's hands, it is.
I found myself to be completely sucked into the very strange world of the Fang family and, like Abby and Buster, completely accepting of the idiosyncraciies of their strange parents.
This is a delightful, heartfelt story.
The narration is masterful, as is always the case with Plummer.

Beautiful, Heart-wrenching, Shocking.

In my opinion, this book is more of an art project than a novel. I remember sitting on a bench in a large gallery in the Louvre. The large, framed painting hung on the wall in front of me showed a scene of ANOTHER large gallery in ANOTHER museum, with some OTHER people sitting on a bench, looking at the painting in front of THEM...

This book is like that. It’s a story of a married couple that are performance artists. They spend their lives trying to manipulate people into being upset and uncomfortable. The fact that their parents do this makes our main characters (the couple’s children) upset, and uncomfortable. As a result of this, and in experiencing how this repeatedly hurts these vulnerable, damaged kids, it is now the you, the reader, who will become upset, and uncomfortable.

What does home and family really mean? If qualities such as loyalty, constancy, and a sense of safety are absent, does it cease to truly BE home and family? At what point do you have the right to walk away? And if you believe you have earned that right... is it even possible to do so?

These questions rise to the surface as Annie and Buster, now grown from damaged kids to damaged adults find themselves with nowhere to turn but the very childhood home that damaged them in the first place. When something happens that could be a tragedy, the siblings have to ask themselves; is the tragedy actually a reality? Or is it just another presentation of their parents art? If their parents ARE behind the events, isn’t that just as tragic? Their parents have manipulated the siblings into being unwitting, living props so many times, they no longer know the difference between what’s real, and what’s “pretend”. As a reader of the book, I came to the conclusion that there was no difference at all between the two.

Through all of this however, the underlining foundation of the book was of love; the true, deep, abiding love of two siblings. It was beautiful.

The dénouement left me feeling a little dead inside, sad, and very tired; but the author was kind enough to spend the last 15 minutes of the story gentling moving us back to solid ground, ending the story with a safe place to land before he leaves you. I was extremely grateful for that.

This book is not for everyone. Some will not find the humor funny, or the underlining themes interesting. For some readers, the author’s attempt at making YOU uncomfortable will be so successful you’ll hate the book.. In the end, I was glad I read it. I found it very thought provoking, and utterly original. The narration was also top rate, and I’ll be looking out for more of the narrator’s work.

I’m looking forward to seeing future reviews on this book to read what others thought of this difficult, but very worthwhile, story.

Depressing and a bit trite

Follows the lives to two dysfunctional siblings from a very dysfunctional family, as their lives fall apart, and then they put themselves back together. The story of the siblings is depressing (and it's hard to believe how stupid some of their actions are as their lives fall apart), and then the later section where their lives come back together seems somewhat trite and unbelievable.

Different

Where does The Family Fang rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

A book that is quite a confusion, plot is all over story ends up ok but frustrating.

What did you like best about this story?

A&B

Which scene was your favorite?

The potato gun.

If you could rename The Family Fang, what would you call it?

Parents gone wild.

Any additional comments?

Different ending would be great.

Unusual, fun story, great performance by Terese P!

Where does The Family Fang rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

In a class by itself, unusual story that I can actually see happening

What did you like best about this story?

The relationship between Annie and Buster over time

Which character – as performed by Therese Plummer – was your favorite?

Annie, but I liked them all

If you could rename The Family Fang, what would you call it?

Wow, that's tough. I think I would leave it as is

Any additional comments?

I liked the beginning part of the book best, kind of dragged in the middle, but ended well.

A dark, somewhat comic portrait of mangled lives.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

The most entertaining thing about this book is at the heart of its main characters dysfunction. It is the antics and sheer eccentricity of the parents that turn the pages. The subsequent ruination it has caused their children makes for a bleak portrait of a family that is completely atypical, but one I think we can all probably identify with in our own way. The parents are almost sociopathic in their extremes, but are just more over the top and weird about what parents everywhere indadvertently do to their children over a lifetime.

Okay, so not really. The characters are completely whacked out. It is, however, a quick read and pretty engrossing story, albeit somewhat thin on plot. The production is great and the narrator easy to follow. I enjoyed this book.