“Spring is panic’s season,” writes Michael Clune near the beginning of his hallucinatory novel, Pan. “But panic, as I was to learn, isn’t a disease of death. It’s a disease of life.”
A dense, boundary-pushing and increasingly psychedelic book that draws you into its peculiar world – much like the experience of panic itself – Clune’s debut wrestles with the elusive experience of consciousness (what it “feels like” to have thoughts) and uses malleable teenage minds to do so.
It’s narrated in the first-person by 15-year-old Nick, forced at the novel’s start to move in with his late-shift-working father to where he lives near Chicago: Chariot Courts, the “cheapest place in all of Libertyville”. At school Nick is mostly concerned with being cool and maintaining his “bad-ass” reputation.
But the sudden onset of panic attacks – the opposite of “cool” – threatens to derail his standing. They crescendo just as the most popular kids in school, Tod (whose personality “floated just out of reach”) and the open-minded, beautiful Sarah, subsume Nick and his best friend Ty into their gang.
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Together, they develop theories around Nick’s panic attacks: that they are “fear aroused by the presence of a god” – namely, the Greek god Pan – and that “your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely”. They celebrate “Belt Day” (surely Beltaine) either to expel Pan, or surrender themselves to him.
Yet the clan’s drug-fuelled revelry and fanatic ideas begin to take a more sinister turn. Fusing elements of beat poetry, Greek philosophy and existentialism through the prism of American high school stories like Dazed and Confused, The Breakfast Club or SE Hinton’s The Outsiders, Pan is a deliberately non-naturalistic portrayal of adolescence.
The novel is rife with far-fetched theories about prophecy, age and perception, but studded with more attuned, grounded observations about class, work and family.
The Ireland-born, Chicago-bred Clune is the author of two award-winning memoirs, White Out (a deep-dive into the heroin underground) and Gamelife (about gaming as a child); his two concerns, childhood and consciousness, are married here.
A surreal, if slightly unwieldy, portrayal of teenagerhood, this mind-bending book is anchored by Clune’s effortless, masterful humour: the result is not only an impressive debut, but a gargantuan feat in coming-of-age literature.
