Extended Summary
Kevin Wilson’s novel The Family Fang tells the story of performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang and their two children, Annie and Buster. Caleb and Camille are more like public disturbances: they appear in public spaces, most often shopping malls, and cause disruptions which, according to their artistic philosophy, result in moments of “beautiful spontaneity.” Since a young age Annie and Buster have participated, often against their will, in these performances, and are known simply in the art world as “Child A” and “Child B.”
The action of the novel follows Annie and Buster, now adults, as they attempt to reorganize their lives after a series of professional and personal catastrophes and come to grips with their unconventional upbringing. Interspersed throughout the novel are flashbacks to previous Family Fang pieces: an impromptu rock concert featuring Annie and Buster that goes purposefully awry when Caleb starts to heckle them; Buster, in drag, entering and winning a local beauty contest; Caleb and Camille handing out fraudulent free-sandwich coupons from a local chicken restaurant; Buster and Annie acting as the titular roles in a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. Nearly all of the Fang “happenings” involve humiliating Buster and Annie but the parents don’t seem to care. What is important to them, above all else, is creating their art. Caleb and Camille’s obsessive, sometimes heartless, behavior first drives Annie, the elder child, away to become an actress. Buster later leaves as well; he becomes a partially successful novelist who then falls on hard times and has to take freelance writing jobs for magazines.
At the outset of the novel both the careers of Buster and Annie are in freefall. Annie has become a movie star with a role in a prominent action-movie franchise, but she’s butting heads with the director of her current film who wants her to appear topless for a scene in the movie. Her eventual response causes commotion and controversy. Later, after Annie’s relationship with her female costar as well as her on-set antics make her tabloid fodder, a reporter for Esquire sets up an interview with Annie. Annie’s publicist advises her to be charming and not overly revealing but Annie ends up spilling her guts to the writer and then sleeping with him, further imperiling her career.
Annie soon decides that she needs to take a break from Hollywood. Her ex-boyfriend calls her and tells her that he’s been hired to write the script for the next film in the aforementioned blockbuster franchise. He convinces Annie to come with him as his "muse" to Wyoming where he plans to write the movie. At the last minute Annie bails on the plan and switches her airline ticket to Nashville, the town where she grew up as the famous “Child A” of the Family Fang.
Buster’s road back home is similarly bizarre. Nearly broke and overdue on his third novel, Buster takes an assignment from a men’s magazine to write about some Iraq war veterans who are making supercharged potato guns in Nebraska. Buster flies out to Nebraska and during a night spent drinking and carousing with his subjects he is accidentally shot in the face with one of the potato guns. Buster’s face is burned and disfigured and since he doesn’t have insurance the three-day hospital stay buries him in debt. Buster has no other option to but to call his parents, who happily offer to pay his way home.
Annie and Buster spend their first few days at home under the influence. Annie puts vodka in her coffee mug each morning and Buster dips daily into the stash of pain killers given to him...
(This entire section contains 1768 words.)
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by the hospital in Nebraska. Eventually a few events puncture their narcotic haze. First, Buster is contacted by a local college professor who wants Buster to speak to his students about writing. Then Annie finds a cache of paintings hidden in her closet; strange portraits of animals and people that are apparently the work of Camille. Buster and Annie confront Camille and their mother admits that she has been painting the pictures secretly, out of fear that Caleb will find them offensive. “You know how he feels about visual art,” Camille explains, referring to Caleb’s credo that visual art is outmoded and that “Art happens when things fucking move around…not when you freeze them in a goddamn block of ice.” Annie and Buster hardly have time to process this revelation about their mother when both parents disappear from town leaving a note saying only, “We have art to make in North Carolina. We’ll be back in a few days.”
Expecting their parents back soon, Camille and Caleb decide to get their lives together. Camille contemplates a series of small movie roles and off-Broadway shows that will reinvigorate her career. Buster has an idea for a novel in addition to a new relationship: he’s struck up a friendship with a student at the college named Suzanne. But Annie and Buster's newfound stability is put in jeopardy when they get a call from a policeman in eastern Tennessee: their parents’ van has been found on the side of the interstate, along with significant amounts of blood and signs of a struggle. Although Buster and Annie immediately suspect that this is another Fang performance the officer disagrees, since there have been a rash of killings in the area.
Buster and Annie are at a loss. They don’t know whether to grieve or to suspect their parents of pulling off another prank. They decide to visit the one person who might have an idea of what their parents are up to, Hobart Waxman, Caleb’s earliest mentor in performance art. Although Caleb and Camille haven’t had friendly relations with anyone in the art world for some time, if anyone has a clue about their whereabouts it would be this man. Annie and Buster travel to San Francisco and surprise Hobart at his house, but he doesn’t know anything about their parents.
Buster and Annie return home uncertain about what to do next. A few days later Buster has an idea and suggests they organize a gallery showing of their mother's secret paintings—billed as newly discovered posthumous works—and see if their parents show up. Annie is skeptical of the plan but agrees to go along. When Buster starts to contact gallery owners with his pitch he finds most of the owners are skeptical, believing the show is some kind of a set-up for a Fang performance. Finally the owner of an experimental art space in San Francisco contacts Buster and tells him she has heard about what is he trying to do and wants to help him.
After weeks of preparation, interviews, press in all of the big art magazines, Buster and Annie put on the show. They nervously wait for their parents’ appearance but Camille and Caleb don’t show. At this point Buster and Annie have to face the possibility that their parents may really be dead. Annie contacts an indie director from her past to see about working in a new movie. Buster works furiously on his novel and spends his free time with Suzanne. One afternoon Suzanne brings Buster a CD by a new band she thinks Buster will like. The band, the Vengeful Virgins, is made up of a pair of teenaged siblings from North Dakota named Lucas and Linas Baltz. Suzanne is right—Buster does like the CD—but she has accidentally stumbled upon a clue to Caleb and Camille’s whereabouts, because Buster recognizes one of the songs on the CD as a song he and his sister played during a Fang performance.
The next day Buster, posing a writer for Spin magazine, calls Lucas Baltz for a telephone interview. Buster soon brings the conversation around to the song and accuses Lucas of not being the writer. After briefly denying it Lucas finally admits he didn’t write the song. He tells Buster that his stepfather taught it to him. Becoming increasingly nervous, Lucas hands the phone to his mother. When the woman comes on the line, Buster asks if she knows Caleb Fang. “You leave him alone,” the woman responds. “I’m warning you, leave my husband alone.”
Buster and Annie figure out where the Baltz family lives and go to North Dakota. They knock on the front door and Caleb answers. Buster and Annie threaten to notify the authorities so Caleb takes them to see their mother. Caleb and Camille explain that for the past ten years they have been preparing to fake their own deaths and slip into new identities—he as Jim Baltz, and she as Patricia Howlett. Bonnie, whose husband had died and left her with Lucas and Linus, would marry Caleb. Posing as Jim Baltz, a long-distance trucker, Caleb could still spend most of his time in Tennessee with Camille. Camille, as Patricia Howlett, has begun to visit a nearby cabin regularly so the people in town will get used to her. Camille and Caleb plan to remain "dead" for years and then spectacularly reappear as their final work of art. They finally decided to put their plan into action when Buster and Annie returned home.
Annie and Buster are upset by this revelation and at the fact their parents would willingly sever all times with them just to create some grand piece of performance art. “You left us,” they tell them but their parents don’t understand. Family “means something but it doesn’t mean as much as art,” Caleb argues. The parents still haven’t forgiven their children for leaving home to live their own lives and create their own art. Annie and Buster try to explain but Caleb won’t listen. He only asks them not to give them away and to refrain from ruining “ten years of difficult artistic work just because your feelings got hurt.” Finally Annie and Buster tell their parents they never want to see them again and leave.
As the novel ends, Annie is on the set of her new indie movie, and Buster is hard at work on his novel. Having finally completed their roles as “Child A” and “Child B” in Camille and Caleb’s performances they are ready to live their own lives.
