“Now Is Not the Time to Panic” Is the Latest Glorious Novel from Kevin Wilson
Can you imagine being a little kid and holding open a picture book that is so unbearably boring that hurling yourself off your tiny bed onto a jagged sea of loose Lego pieces seems more pleasurable than reading? No. You can’t. Because when you were a kid, you didn’t look at books you didn’t like. You didn’t open them up because they won fancy awards, or because the neighborhood smarty-pants was reading them. You only looked at the books that gave you joy.
Why don’t grown-ups stick with that formula? (Just about everyone I know has a “should read” book they are trying to get through.) If you have any interest in joy-reading, then run out today and pick up Now Is Not the Time to Panic, the latest glorious novel from Kevin Wilson.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic is about oddballs and misfits; it’s about art, and how the making of art turns what’s weird about you into what’s magical about you.
Sixteen-year old Frankie (Frances) Budge is a girl who has never kissed a boy and doesn’t particularly like to be touched. She has older triplet brothers, feral things who tumble in and out of the house smelling of fast-food fries. Since Frankie’s father left to start a new family (with a new wife and a baby daughter, also named Frances), Frankie’s mother has abandoned any idea of taming the triplets. She did, however, insist they get summer jobs. So while she’s at work, and they’re flipping burgers, Frankie is alone—a state of being that suits her fine, since she has no friends and just wants to write the novel she started—a reimagined, “evil” Nancy Drew. When Frankie meets Zeke, however, the new kid in her small, Tennessee town, she discovers someone who is even more of an outsider than she. Zeke wants to make art. Frankie already is, though she doesn’t yet know that writing is making art. The day Frankie shows Zeke a broken photocopy machine—stolen by the triplets and then abandoned in the garage—a means to merge their talents is discovered. Between their comically awkward kiss sessions (which made my lips hurt just reading about them), Frankie and Zeke endeavor to make art. Soon, they create something beautiful, thrilling, and so far removed from a Hallmark card with a kitten next to a red watering can that the people in town are frightened. The (unwarranted) fear turns to dangerous hysteria as the townspeople try to find out who is behind this unsigned, anonymous creation. The act of the two teens having expressed themselves through art changes not only the artists themselves but the lives of everyone who sees their work. Rather than being destroyed by the experience, Frankie is saved—from others as well as from her own inward-turned inclinations.
Frankie’s voice is so clear and compelling, her inner life so well-drawn, that I don’t doubt her existence for a second. On the act of writing, Frankie says, “I thought that the saddest thing that could happen was that something inside your head worked so hard to make it into the world and then nothing happened. It just disappeared.” On the act of reading, she says, “I had no idea what other people thought was good or what was important. And so I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified they would tell me how stupid I was. Every single thing you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Every single thing was a secret.” Frankie Budge: C’est moi!
There is immense gratification in the final quarter of the novel, when we visit Frankie as an adult and discover how she (and Zeke, too, later) turned out. Of course, seeing an adult woman who has “made it” isn’t as thrilling as seeing a kid in danger, trying to “make it.” Still, I was hooked, as adult Frankie’s voice is just as compelling as her teen voice. When grown Frankie looks at grown Zeke, she observes, “He looked like he was one of two things: a man who made coffee tables from reclaimed driftwood and sold them for three grand, or a man who was very, very suspicious of the circumstances of 9/11.”
There’s no need to impale yourself on Legos, or even turn on the TV, as long as Kevin Wilson is writing fiction. After you finish Now Is Not the Time to Panic, work your way backward through his other quirky, smart, and entertaining books. An obligatory book is the gateway to Friends or Frasier reruns. There is huge pleasure in watching those familiar, beloved shows. But if you’re anything like me, you will find even greater pleasure in reading Now Is Not the Time to Panic.
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