Book Review: Now Is Not The Time To Panic by Kevin Wilson

By Simon Demetriou

There are times in our lives that we never seem to shake off, that don’t so much haunt us as continue to form part of our core selves well beyond when we or others might feel we ought to have moved on. For Frankie Budge, the protagonist and narrator of Kevin Wilson’s latest novel, that time is the summer of her sixteenth year. Perhaps sadly, perhaps fortunately, few of our adolescent summers have provoked the kind of far-reaching impact that Frankie’s does in Now Is Not The Time To Panic. Still, the power with which Wilson evokes the nostalgia of the summer of 1996, and the deep need to find a place and leave a mark, cannot fail to resonate with anyone who has ever been a teenager, especially if you, like Frankie, never understood ‘the complex negotiations required to be popular’.

In the small town of Coalfield, Tennessee, Frankie Budge watches on as all the boys she knows wrestle each other in a swimming pool for possession of a greased-up watermelon. Against this comically violent backdrop, she meets Zeke, another 16-year-old, with whom she shares three things in common: both are outsiders, Zeke because he’s just moved to Coalfield temporarily, Frankie because she just doesn’t like anybody; both have ‘dads who sucked’; and both aspire to create art, Frankie novels, Zeke illustrations. Together, they eat junk food, watch horror movies, suck on each other’s ‘faces till our mouths were red and angry’, and tacitly decide that ‘if anything was going to keep us from having sex… it would be art.’ So they make some art.

In a moment of shared inspiration, Frankie and Zeke come up with a poster bearing the words, ‘The edge is a shanty town full of gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.’ Zeke adds a surreal scene framed by ‘two giant, disembodied hands’. Then they spatter it with their own blood. All that’s left is to make use of the stolen Xerox machine in Frankie’s garage, and put their art out into the world. What happens after that is an example of both the power of art and the ease with which hysteria spreads: conspiracy, vigilantism, deaths, and episodes of Unsolved Mysteries ensue.

Ultimately, this brilliantly observed, wryly comic book about adolescence and how the past is never really left behind makes you both miss the teenager you once were and feel immense gratitude that you don’t need to be a teen anymore. I predict a movie, so read the book fast if you enjoy telling people how the movie doesn’t match up to the novel. It won’t.

Now Is Not The Time To Panic by Kevin Wilson is published by HarperCollins.