Pan: A Novel by Michael Clune

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.

REVIEWS

“[Pan] keenly describes the symptoms—and more important, the existential stakes—of extreme anxiety . . . Clune has turned his cockeyed sensibility and coruscating intellect to fiction . . . Nicholas’s narration captures the subjective experience of panic with high-res precision . . . The overall effect is like Judy Blume filtered through David Lynch or William S. Burroughs: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Nicholas, Having a Panic Attack While My Friends Trip on Acid . . . Perhaps psychologists and philosophers should prescribe this dazzling and disorienting novel as exposure therapy for both the sick and the well.” —Scott Stossel, The Atlantic

“Nick is a beguiling addition to the literary lineage of child mystics that descends from the stories of J.D. Salinger . . . [Pan] ought to be a breakout for Mr. Clune, who captures Nick’s strobing visions with remarkable lucidity and excellent dry humor. . . . The child-mystic novel argues that maturation dulls us to elemental and overwhelming wonders. Pan is a reawakening.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence . . . Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows . . . when we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world.” —The Guardian

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-0593834428
Pages: 336