Fangs and Thirst

It snowed here recently. Which is only weird given how this winter’s gone. Today, the weather is near 50F. It feels like spring. Or California. We went for a run the other day, in a light rain. It was nice, to see the mist on the water, to see the ducks make sudden white points in the fog. It was a different view.

I recently finished two books that I liked a lot – the seduction of one was unsurprising, the other, a shock and (perhaps because of it) a more lasting pleasure.

"Plot is incidental." Those three words come from The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. I love that line, maybe because it's tautology -- incidental only after the fact and maybe because I've been thinking about the role of plot in a novel lately. Broadly, the book is about family of artists and how they negotiate their love for each other. Camille and Caleb Fang are 1970s performance artists, dedicated to creating “happenings” that disrupt ordinary life and whose artistic reputations are staked on a lifetime of performances that include their children’s sometimes unwitting, always reluctant, participation. Like other children, the Fang children, known as Child A (Annie) and B (Buster), grow up at the mercy of their parents. Like any children, their parents’ world, the rules they go by, become de facto the children’s. As a result, A & B spend their childhoods performing alongside their parents, chafing under their parents’ single-mindedness. Children don’t kill art, one character says to the children grown up, Art kills children. Narrowly, the book is about the disappearance of Camille and Caleb and what Annie and Buster decide to do about it.

The book is in parts, hilarious, and in other parts, terrible and sad. While the characters are extreme, they are never quite caricatures. The essential question that troubles them (and continues to trouble me) is how to pursue something utterly selfish in the least harmful way possible. It’s the kind of book I’m learning more to enjoy; the kind of book where, at first look, the primary strength is plot, not style. The kind where style shows itself in negative – precise, direct, writing that prevents spillage. Clean, punchy, lines. Sharp corners. The writing feels the product of a lot of revision. A little bloodless. Though the resulting effect is an altogether different perfume.

And perhaps that’s why I’ve held onto those three words: plot is incidental. Incidental to –? That space can hold a variety of words. I recently also finished Ken Kalfus’ collection, Thirst. I loved some of the stories in that collection. What a range! They reminded me of the kinds of stories I’ve always loved and feel are rare to come by – those stories where magic seeps into ordinary moments and reveal, in the turn of a sentence, that you’ve been someplace else all along. Stories that are almost fables, timeless: a man who inhabits two lives; an au pair's sexual frigidity; a boy who shops for his first suit with his father -- in preparation for his criminal trial. Stories that are not marked by popular cleverness and wit but warmth above all.

** Bonus: "Plotting Against Plot" by Vincent Czyz in Agni online, here.