The friends at the center of Kevin Wilson’s “Now Is Not the Time to Panic” hang photocopied posters around their small Tennessee town. Chaos ensues.
NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC, by Kevin Wilson
These days, teenagers of the 1990s find themselves in the bizarre position of having to conjure their childhoods as if they had taken place in the 1890s. Is life before smartphones really so alien? American teens still drive around with their nascent licenses, listening to questionable music, eating Pop-Tarts from gas stations (possibly, chillingly, the same Pop-Tarts). More important, they still develop intense and thrilling friendships. In his fourth novel, “Now Is Not the Time To Panic,” Kevin Wilson (best known for “Nothing to See Here” and “The Family Fang”) addresses the contours of this liminal time, capturing the still-relevant feeling of trying “to remember what was in the cassette player, if it was cool.” His is a buoyant tribute to small-town life, a book about creativity and creation in a world before “send” buttons.
Fade in: Summer, 1996. Coalfield, Tenn. Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge is bored out of her mind. She lives with her saintly, divorced mother and triplet brothers, interchangeable characters who have all the menace of Shakespearean witches and none of the prophecy. One gestures with the tip of his pizza slice “in a way that only my brothers could make look threatening.” Frankie is a bit of a blank slate herself, awkwardness being her defining characteristic. While at the local pool, observing a casually violent contest involving a Vaseline-coated watermelon, Frankie encounters Zeke, a “skinny and twitchy” peer who presumes the friendless Frankie is also new in town. The two forge a bond (she a budding novelist, he a budding illustrator), engaging in occasional make-out sessions haunted by the specter of bad breath. But what seals their friendship and serves as a cue-ball break for the story is their imaginative impulse. At loose ends one day, Zeke, a thoughtful boy but no match for the inner workings of a teenage girl, suggests they “make art” — “like art was cookies or microwave popcorn,” Frankie says. From then on, their summer is defined by the sound of “pencils and pens scraping so softly against the paper” as they develop a shared aesthetic language.
Wilson adeptly evokes what it was like to be a creative kid in the 1990s, having to fend for inspiration (books, images, films, lyrics, zines) on your own, or through a sibling or a friend, and then follow the trail. He captures the nonlinear absorption of culture before listicles, when “every single thing that you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame.”
One day, Frankie and Zeke produce an enigmatic image using both of their skill sets, an illustration with Frankie’s words scrawled above it: The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. Is it nonsense? Is it brilliance? It matters not. What matters is that there’s a photocopier in Frankie’s garage. The words take on the power of incantation. Frankie, in particular, is electrified (“a kind of electrocution that kept your heart beating in time”) by her and Zeke’s stealth as they pin copies of the poster around town. “We didn’t know about Xerox art or Andy Warhol or anything like that,” Frankie tells us. “We thought we’d made it up. And I guess, for us, we had.”
But the cryptic posters seize the public’s attention far beyond anything the artists anticipated or intended, spawning copycats, conspiracy theories and, eventually, fatalities. This fantastical frenzy will become known as the Coalfield Panic of 1996.
Wilson shines when detailing the domino effect and the dissemination of images before social media. There are the headlines that read “Troubling Street Art Vexes Small Town,” the subsequent TV movies, the “Saturday Night Live” sketch and the Urban Outfitters merchandise. In a roundabout way, he also uses the tumult to cast light on Frankie’s artistic insecurities. When an art professor opines to a reporter that the poster’s creators “seemed to have some awareness of culturally relevant artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring,” a frustrated Frankie just wants to know “if the professor thought the poster was any good.”
“Now Is Not the Time to Panic” reads like a movie. By which I don’t mean “cinematic,” I mean like a movie. Strings of dialogue, more predictable than verisimilar, are linked with episodes of brief action that could have been dropped into “Adventureland,” a 2009 film about the summer of 1987, or — given that we’re dealing with at least one dead body, a secret pact and a narrator who’s now a professional author — into “Stand by Me,” a 1986 film about the summer of 1959. Are these negative comparisons? I, too, am a teenager of the mid-90s, so I vote “no.” Here is a charming story with enough pockets of pathos to keep the novel from feeling weightless. The only issue is that it seems to want more for itself. A lot more. And it becomes increasingly vocal about asking for it.
The grand themes (art, friendship, memory) sit like Vaseline on the surface of a pool, with repetition too often standing in for insight. The book is adamant that the adult Frankie, who is telling us this tale (sometimes with a stray “you know?” slumped up against the fourth wall), is so haunted by the episode that she’s basically living in hiding like a character from Dana Spiotta’s great novel “Eat the Document.” Long estranged from Zeke, she is running from a past she’s convinced will have major repercussions for her present. This is a passable concern for a “well-behaved dork” convinced at 16 she’s a “bad person,” but for a grown woman? It comes off as manufactured drama. The anxiety that adult Frankie feels when a writer from The New Yorker plans to expose her as the originator of “one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture” becomes as implausible as the fact that her narrative voice has not changed a lick in 21 years. “I could feel the world getting smaller and smaller,” adult Frankie says, “and that scared me because I’d already made myself pretty small to ensure none of these memories got out of me.” The novel becomes dominated by the author’s valiant attempts to make a case for adult Frankie’s conundrum, for her poster-adjacent compulsions. But our heroine did not commit an act of political terrorism. She didn’t eat any of her friends after a plane crash or push them into a ravine. She’s barely had occasion to lie about this incident because, New Yorker reporters notwithstanding, no one has ever accused her.
To Wilson’s credit, this last fact is part of his point. No one suspected Frankie or Zeke would be capable of such impact because they flew under the radar as kids, half-abandoned at a pivotal age. If you focus on this and the more sentimental aspects of “Now Is Not the Time to Panic,” if you take it as a spirited PG-13 tale of summer mischief, you’ll enjoy yourself. But this is not the high-stakes or interior evocation of storytelling, friendship and ambition you’ll find in (say) Elena Ferrante’s or Yiyun Li’s work, or in recent books like Vendela Vida’s “We Run the Tides” and Jean Chen Ho’s “Fiona and Jane.” What Wilson offers instead is a largehearted depiction of American teenagerhood, a period of adolescence that has not changed so drastically in the past 30 years. Or, for that matter, the past century.
Sloane Crosley’s latest novel, “Cult Classic,” was published in June.
NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC | By Kevin Wilson | 246 pp. | Ecco | $27.99
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