Shattered Lives

Abstract

Shattered Lives Floyd Skloot (bio) The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2011. 310 pages. $23.99) Kevin Wilson’s first book of fiction, the short-story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, appeared in 2009. In keeping with its title echo of Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), the book probes below the surface of daily life to find the strange landscapes and beasts inhabiting our psychological underworld. Praised for its weirdness, its “bent sense of humor” (Kirkus), “twisted storytelling” (Wall Street Journal), and quirkiness (Entertainment Weekly), the book was seen as both a promising debut and a genuine accomplishment. Its stories include parents who spontaneously combust, a company that provides stand-in grandparents for families in which real grandparents are sick or nasty or dead, men hired to tell people in detail about the worst things that could happen to them, babies born with mouthsful of perfectly developed [End Page xxviii] teeth, and sideshows and video games that take over lives. Critics evoked such authors as Carson McCullers and George Saunders, and placed Wilson as a hip gothic goofball with a serious undercoating. The very qualities that seemed to be most attractive and attention-grabbing—Wilson’s inventiveness, charm, and wackiness, his clever way with premises, flair for offbeat characters, his zappy energy—could also be a young fiction writer’s sharpest limitations. This is especially problematic as a writer makes the move from short stories to the novel, in which depth of character and insight, convincing narrative, and control of effect rather than conceptual dazzle and surface allure are needed to carry a reader along. With his first novel, The Family Fang, Wilson shows himself to be, at the age of thirty-three, a fully arrived, powerful, poised artist, capable of sustaining his gift for cultural edginess and eccentricity without sacrificing storytelling force, psychological keenness, or thematic resonance. His book has plenty of bizarre outlandish action in it, but also acute nuance—a feel for the way the intimate disturbances of childhood resonate deep into adulthood. It is a novel about a familiar topic—family dysfunction—rendered so freshly and managed so deftly that it feels new and shocking despite how much we may already have known about what parents can do. The four members of the Fang family at the novel’s core are, at least initially, likeable loonies at the margins of artistic expression. Father Caleb and mother Camille are performance artists devoted to creating public discomfort, to jarring audiences out of complacency. In one instance they stage marriage proposals on board a sequence of airplanes, involving their own children and other passengers in the drama. In another scene they create fake coupons redeemable for free chicken sandwiches at a mall food court and hand them out to passersby, creating havoc when people demand their freebies. When possible the Fangs use their two children, Annie and Buster (also known, alarmingly enough, as Child A and Child B), as participants in their stunts. Growing up, Annie and Buster find themselves in radically shameful situations, as when they are made to play bad drum and guitar music in public while shouting crazy off-key lyrics, panhandling to raise funds for an operation on a sick dog that does not actually exist. “For two people who had never learned to play their instruments,” Wilson writes, “they were managing to perform even more poorly than expected.” Some of the pieces could easily be seen as assaults on Annie’s and Buster’s senses of identity or sexuality, as when they end up kissing passionately while playing Romeo and Juliet; or when Buster, at nine years old and wearing an evening dress, competes in and wins the Little Miss Crimson Clover’s Junior Miss beauty contest and then reveals himself to be male after the crown has been placed on his wigged head. It was, clearly, a very weird childhood in which the children were viewed primarily as assets, compelled to assume varying identities, and placed in provocative and confusing situations regularly. This advice from [End Page xxix] their mother is typical of the kind of lessons they learned: “What you...