Ten Years in the Tub (118 page)

     
  
Wild Abandon
—Joe Dunthorne

     
  
The End of Everything
—Megan Abbott

     
  
Bury Me Deep
—Megan Abbott

     
  
Your Voice in My Head
—Emma Forrest

O
ne of the pleasures of visiting my half brother, who lives in a lovely house in Sussex, not far from the south coast, is that he knows someone who entertains the children by firing whole lemons from a homemade bazooka. He doesn't fire the lemons at anything, but that's the point: a piece of waxy yellow fruit shooting up hundreds of feet through a blue sky is one of the best spectacles Mother Nature can offer. (And let's face it, even then she needed the help of a man-made explosive device.) In Kevin Wilson's first novel,
The Family Fang
, Buster Fang becomes badly injured when, during the course of a magazine assignment, he gets his facial features temporarily rearranged by a potato fired from a very similar device. I am pretty sure I would have loved
The Family Fang
anyway, but sometimes you need this kind of unexpected, almost suspiciously friendly connection to a novel. Buster is blasted by the potato on page 32 of my hardback copy, just at the point where, if you are the kind of person who
gives up on books, you might be asking yourself whether you're going to stick with it. And then, suddenly, like a sign from God, you're thinking, Hey! That's Sam's lemon gun! Except they're using potatoes! Earlier in my writing career, I contributed reviews regularly to some of the more respectable broadsheet newspapers; now you can see why I gave up. I could never figure out a way of shoehorning the lemon-gun stories into my otherwise careful, sober appraisals, and yet sometimes you need them.

I came across
The Family Fang
as a result of good old-fashioned browsing, an activity that the internet, the decline of bookshops, and a ludicrously optimistic book-buying policy (see every previous column in these pages) has rendered almost obsolete. I picked it up because of the great Ann Patchett's generous and enthusiastic blurb—“The best single-word description would be genius”—and it stayed picked up because, on further investigation, it appeared to be a novel at least partly about art and why we make it, and I love books on that subject. I walked it over to the tills because I had recently come to the conclusion that I needed to read books by younger writers, not out of a sense of professional duty but because I was feeling the lack of youth in my fiction diet. Over the last couple of months I've read James Hynes's
Next
and Per Petterson's
Out Stealing Horses
, both novels about older men looking back on their lives, and the veteran biographer Claire Tomalin's magisterial life of Dickens, and suddenly I wanted to know what, if anything, the young were thinking. This month, everyone I read was between the ages of thirty and forty, which is about as young as I can go without wanting to hang myself.

The Family Fang
is pretty much the kind of novel you might dream of finding during an aimless twenty minutes in a bookstore: it's ambitious, it's funny, it takes its characters seriously, and it has soul—here defined as that beautiful ache fiction can bring on when it wants the best for us all while simultaneously accepting that most of the time, even good enough isn't possible. Buster and Annie Fang are the adult children of Camille and Caleb Fang, performance artists whose art involved and frequently embarrassed their children while they were growing up. A series of calamities (potato bazooka for Buster, accidental nudity and unwise sex for Annie) results in the children returning home to Tennessee, where their parents are still working, still hoping to convince their
kids that family performance-art is their one true calling.

You can see how this setup might have gone very wrong in lesser hands. It might have been so unbearably quirky that you got toothache, or too pleased with itself, or all high-concept and no low detail, but Kevin Wilson steps around every pothole with utter confidence. He has fun with the premise—the Fangs' stunts are inventive and plausible—but in the end this is a novel about parents and children, so everything serves a more sober purpose, although the sobriety never slows the book down.
The Family Fang
has been and will be compared to the work of Wes Anderson, but Anderson has never struck me as someone who gets engrossed in the psychology of his characters, and in any case, despite the beatnik milieu, Wilson tells his story pretty straight. I was reminded more of Anne Tyler's painstaking verisimilitude, and the love she lavishes on her people, and the way their apparently particular missteps and misunderstandings and regrets can serve, somehow, as shorthand for the many and various ways we all mess up.

“Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.” These are the views of Caleb Fang, soon after he has shot his mentor as part of a particularly daring performance piece. I suspect, however, that most of us who spend our days making shit up have bought into a similar philosophy at some point—or have wished that we were ruthless enough and committed enough to be able to, at least.
The Family Fang
is a novel that wonders aloud whether this particular creation myth is such a good idea, while at the same time proving that art with a moral sense doesn't have to be square.

Joe Dunthorne's second novel,
Wild Abandon
, is set on a commune in Wales, but it has a great deal in common with
The Family Fang
. Dunthorne shares with Wilson the conviction that jokes don't necessarily compromise the seriousness of a novel, and indeed may actually help smooth the path between the writer and the reader by making the book more enjoyable. And, perhaps weirdly, both writers are interested in how a parental addiction to the unconventional might complicate the lives of the children. In
Wild Abandon
, Kate, a teenage girl who has spent her entire life on the Welsh commune, finds herself increasingly drawn
to the semidetached suburban attractions of her slightly dull boyfriend's family; meanwhile, her precocious but inevitably unworldly younger brother, Albert, is preparing for the impending apocalypse, an event confidently awaited by one of the many people in his life who stand, somewhat unsteadily, in loco parentis.