PositiveThe Kenyon ReviewThe main characters of Kevin Wilson’s novel...will draw the inevitable comparisons: Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums, J.D. Salinger’s troubled and precocious Glass children. But The Family Fang is all its own, a book that in voice, style, and imagination tells a multifaceted story about family, art, and the tricky business of making those disparate things work together ... The Family Fang is at its best showing us what it has meant for the Fang children to grow up with parents who placed art first. Buster and Annie’s challenges, even at their most absurd, are always compelling. This emotional grounding lets Wilson convince his reader of the novel’s more far-reaching conceits—the Fangs’ art, but also Buster’s injury at the hands of those Iraq vets. In the hands of a different novelist, this might be a one-note joke, a forgettable set piece designed to get Buster home. In Wilson’s hands this scene, like the novel as a whole, moves beyond the expected and into something greater.
