Pan
A Novel
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4.0 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Nominated for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize • A Washington Post Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME and Slate
“Pan is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit . . . For those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer . . . Pan is exhilarating, a pure joy—and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror—from end to end.” —Matthew Spektor, The Washington Post
“Deliciously observed, ferociously strange . . . Reading his experience of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs.” —Kaveh Akbar, The New York Times Book Review
A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This novel is a surreal trip through the psychological terrain of a mind in turmoil. Nick is a 15-year-old Chicagoan with a lonely home life who’s begun experiencing anxiety attacks. Getting professional help becomes a blind alley, so in confused desperation, he seeks refuge with a crew of iconoclastic kids who hide from the outside world inside an old barn. Author Michael Clune weaves a serpentine line through Nick’s increasingly unhinged inner life as he struggles to understand himself by obsessing over cultural artifacts like Italian Renaissance paintings, Victorian theater, ’70s arena rock, 19th-century French symbolist poetry, and more. Metaphysical, philosophical, and utterly unpredictable, Pan is a compelling triumph, always making you feel just as off-kilter as its protagonist. Clune’s knack for making the most outlandish ideas seem commonplace could have you questioning your own inner thoughts before it’s all over.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A courageous teenager explores the roots of his anxiety in the evocative and erudite first novel by memoirist Clune (Gamelife). Fifteen-year-old Nick has moved into his dad's condo in suburban Chicago. His parents are divorced, and his mother thinks he needs his father. But his father's never there, so after Nick has his first panic attack, he embarks on a lonely quest to discover where his anxiety comes from. After his third episode, he checks into the hospital, where a doctor teaches him to cope by breathing into a paper bag. His visits to a psychiatrist and a therapist are epic failures, so he turns to literature, discovering that the word panic comes from the name of the god Pan. His friend Sarah takes him to meet a group of kids who hang out in a barn near the house of brothers Ian and Tod. Wasted most of the time, the group toys with the idea that Nick's panic and angst are magical, and Pan has gotten inside him. On the other hand, Nick's friend Ty wonders if it isn't because of his "familylessness," so Nick adds his parents' divorce to the litany of causes. Unable to sleep, he begins to write as a form of therapy ("I'll write all of this, so it's mine"). Clune unfurls breathtaking pages-long descriptions of Nick's disordered thinking, and as Nick faces the limits of writing as therapy, the narrative barrels toward a frightening and enigmatic ending. This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake.
