Since the recession, lots of adult children have had to move back in with their parents. But few have done so with as much justifiable trepidation as Buster and Annie Fang.
Growing up, Fang family outings weren't exactly trips to Disney World. Caleb and Camille Fang were performance artists, creators of "choreographed spontaneity," who used their children as artistic props. “It's what they do. They make something crazy happen and then they watch you try to deal with it,” the adult Annie explains.
Child A and Child B, as their parents called them, grew up being flung into chaotic situations and having to improvise, whether it was busking to raise money for an operation for their nonexistent dog while their dad heckled them from the crowd, or Buster having to wear a dress in the Little Miss Crimson Clover pageant. (He won.) “Neither Annie nor Buster, itching in their new clothes, unaware of the exact nature of their parents' plans, believed they would ever totally understand what their parents meant when they said fun.”
Kevin Wilson wittily recreates the "productions" in his first novel, The Family Fang, which at times is reminiscent of Wes Anderson's quirky, R-rated comedy, "The Royal Tenanbaums," without losing its arch originality.
Finally, after a hilariously awful high-school production of "Romeo and Juliet," Annie called a halt to all the high-concept shenanigans. She left home and became an Oscar-nominated actress, while – since the failure of his second novel – Buster writes soul-deadening freelance stories for "Potent," a men's magazine.
Annie's career detonates after a tabloid scandal. Buster is injured after letting someone shoot a beer can off his head with a potato gun (after a lifetime of Fang performances, he lacks any self-defense mechanisms). They warily slink home to Tennessee, where Caleb and Camille also have fallen on hard times, current culture making it spectacularly difficult to get a rise out of a crowd.
Then Caleb and Camille disappear and are presumed dead by the police, leaving Buster and an irate Annie to wonder if their parents really have been murdered or have pulled off a new caper.
