Love and Art Collide in “Now is Not the Time to Panic” https://ift.tt/Q9Edn8S
In Coalfield, Tennessee, in the summer of 1996, 16-year-old Frances (Frankie) Budge and new-to-town Zeke form an unlikely situationship after a game of Vaseline watermelon — the rules of which involve a bunch of local brutes battling one another for a greased watermelon in a swimming pool — goes awry. The serendipity of these two adolescents coming together turns what would have been another dull summer into anything but in Kevin Wilson’s Now is Not the Time to Panic.
“It was summer, which meant that nothing was happening. It was insanely hot, making it hard to care about anything other than eating Popsicles,” Frankie remembers. Then Zeke shows up, and their amalgamation of interests – writing and art – marks a watershed that dictates the rest of Frankie’s life. When she and Zeke find a Xerox machine that Frankie’s three brothers had stolen and left to rot in the back of the garage, they soon change the trajectory of not only their lives, but also the sleepy town of Coalfield and even pop culture as they come to know it.
The edge is a shanty town filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.
These are the words Frankie scribes on a piece of paper, and soon Zeke decorates the remaining space with haunting and emotive images. After Frankie and Zeke make hundreds of copies of their artistic masterpiece and place them around town, panic ensues. News outlets and local authorities believe the posters to be the work of menacing thugs or devil worshippers.
While much of the story revolves around the teenaged versions of Frankie and Zeke, another timeline also unravels 21 years after that life-changing summer, when a journalist from The New Yorker discovers by happenstance that Frankie is the poster’s creator and thus the creator of the Coalfield Panic of 1996 – think: episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, Saturday Night Live sketches, made-for-TV movies, the Flaming Lips’ release of an album called Gold-Seekers in the Shantytown, and even the Urban Outfitters decision to create merchandise with replications of the poster.
Now is Not the Time to Panic is a coming-of-age story that also explores what life as an angsty teenager in the 1990s actually felt like. It’s Wilson’s fourth novel – following Nothing to See Here, Perfect Little World, and The Family Fang. For you die-hard Wilson fans, you may have recognized the incantation that sets Frankie and Zeke’s life abuzz from The Family Fang, as Buster – a struggling writer – chants it almost like a motivational prayer to himself while attempting to write his next novel. Of course, there’s more to the invocation, and once you’ve read one or both books it’s worth looking into Wilson’s background to find the true impetus for the phrase.
Whether you’ve read previous works of Wilson’s or this is your first, the propulsive plot and the author’s ability to get inside the head of his characters is what will bring you back to his novels over and over again. Wilson creates a believable and compelling character in Frankie, whether it’s Frankie as a brooding adolescent or Frankie as a 37-year-old wife and mother. The novel’s character development and its dual timeline allow the book to engage a wide range of readers.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic is also a great example of how art, intentionally or not, pushes the boundaries and gives the world a different shape and perspective, depending on the observer. The outcome of the events related here affect Frankie and Zeke in vastly different ways. For them, for their parents, siblings, even their neighbors, the effects of the poster were different, and within the unfolding of each character’s arc is a subtle glimpse into mental health and how and why art matters to those who struggle — and those who struggle are, when you think about it, all of us.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic
By Kevin Wilson
Ecco Press
First published November 8, 2022
Paperback published August 1, 2023
0 Commentaires