In The Family Fang (2011), the siblings Annie and Buster return to their childhood home to figure out how to revive their fizzling careers and process their pasts (as kids, they were constantly enlisted in their parents’ insane pieces of performance art). And, more often than not, the defining moment qualifies as traumatic. In much of his fiction, we’re brought to small-town Tennessee by narrators who were teens in the ’80s or ’90s. Now, for the first time, Frankie lets herself dive deep into memories of being 16, when she and her only friend, Zeke, made a cryptic piece of art that sparked all kinds of mayhem.Īs idiosyncratic as that premise sounds, it’s a standard Wilsonian setup (or, one might say, obsession): An adult receives news that propels them back to a defining moment of their misfit youth. The call sends Frankie reeling-“ Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, fuck, no in my head, a kind of spiraling madness … Because, I guess, I’d let myself think that no one would ever find out.” Not that she’s ever left that summer behind she’s been replaying snippets of it in her head for the past 21 years. For Kevin Wilson fans, the opening of his fourth novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic, will feel familiar: A woman named Frankie Budge receives a call from a reporter asking about her role in a moral panic that spread from a tiny Tennessee town to the rest of America in the summer of 1996.

Now is not the time to panic book