A Novel That Will Make You Laugh and Then Punch You in the Gut

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. 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. 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.

As idiosyncratic as that premise sounds, it’s a standard Wilsonian setup (or, one might say, obsession): (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). In (2019), the listless 28-year-old Lillian gets a letter from her high-school best friend, Madison, and we learn how she derailed Lillian’s once-promising future. In the short story “,” Patrick, now an adult, learns that his eighth-grade biology teacher has died, and we’re thrown back to the time when Patrick was a pariah and the lonely Mr. Reynolds served as both a rescuer and a warning. In “,” Jamie, now grown, recalls an 11th-grade classmate tormenting him and his only friend, Ben, in ever more horrifying ways. To put it another way, Wilson looks at first glance like a poster boy for the trauma-plot trend that the critic Parul Sehgal lamented . In the litany of recent stories about damaged pasts, she argued, the figure in the foreground tends to have the same profile: “Stalled, confusing to others, prone to sudden silences and jumpy responsiveness. Something gnaws at her, keeps her solitary and opaque, until there’s a sudden rip in her composure and her history comes spilling out, in confession or in flashback.” Instead of focusing on the future, Sehgal wrote, these stories direct us to the past (). Gone are “odd angularities of personality” and trajectories stuffed with intrigue, deepened by imagination, broadened by attention to the outer world.