Pan
by Michael Clune
Penguin Press, 2025
Review by Kevin Mulligan
Kevin Mulligan on Michael Clune
The Pan of Michael Clune’s Pan is the Greek god: the half-goat, leader of jam sessions, great laugher “bedecked with a garland of sharp pine needles” (Ovid, Raeburn trans.). What is he doing in Clune’s homely, “spiritually inert” midwestern suburbs? He is, according to one strand of the novel, inhabiting narrator Nick’s consciousness via his panic attacks. Pan, we learn⎯in a contrivance a little academic (Clune is a professor at Ohio State)⎯is one of the etymological roots of panic, which “originally referred to the sudden fear aroused by the presence of a god.”
To take panic attacks seriously is to ask what causes them. Nick, our fifteen-year-old narrator, child of divorce, sensitive and earnest (“How is it different than like, an insult? An insult to life?”), has his first attack while considering that his hand is a thing, not unlike the other things of this world: “My hand is a thing too. Hand, textbook, eraser. Three things.” Why would this insight cause panic? Does it make Nick himself more or less like a thing? The attacks, he writes later, make him “feel completely alienated from the object world,” which includes, now, his hand. He is experiencing an estrangement from his body, which might feel as if “he”⎯the “I” of consciousness⎯were trapped inside a foreign object. One can usually perform similar interpretations on later triggers, which include the presence of Carl (a strange younger schoolmate who follows Nick around, “a talisman of the end, like a prophecy”), the word “diabetes,” and a buzzing fly that no one else seems to see.
What does a panic attack feel like? In addition to the usual shortness of breath, as though one were having a heart attack, Nick is overwhelmed by the sensation that he⎯his consciousness⎯is about to leap out of his body. “Panic [. . .] is an excess of consciousness. Your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely.” Trapped in a body with the desire⎯he also sees himself desiring⎯to escape. Is this an insatiable eagerness for life, an eagerness forestalled? Nick is at odds with his body as much as his personality. And what about Pan? At the very least, Pan represents the presence, in one’s innermost domain, of something other: “What is happening, I thought. And the thought stood still in my mind, vibrating. It’s not mine, I thought. I’m not me.” Is this the excess of consciousness? An intruder? There is nothing particularly rustic or wild, nothing that denotes this other as Pan except, Nick thinks⎯only after he’s looked the god up⎯for his characteristic laugh, which “even animals fear.” Whether this laugh is directed at the world or at Nick himself is not clear.
These panic attacks are experienced, not as arbitrary medical events, but “like insight.” The insight of Pan, however, does not survive the translation to language. It takes, sometimes, the form of an image; late in the novel, Pan shows Nick a “silent black tree” growing through the barn, which is somehow connected to that incessant buzzing fly. It is a riddle, one morbidly suggestive⎯the death of a group of classic-rock stoners who hang out in a barn, death in general⎯but not a definitive metaphor. Panic lends the world a funereal aura. “Each panic attack,” Nick explains, “gave me the very clear sense that I was seeing and understanding things for the first time.” This sense of “first times” is important to Clune. The “first time” is what Clune chased as an addict and later wrote about in White Out, his heroin memoir. According to Clune, it is not the sweetness of that first high which addicts chase, but a repetition of its firstness. Heroin, or the “white out” it promises, is “something that is always new.” In fact, in Writing Against Time, Clune’s excellent work of criticism, one of the roles of art is to replicate this feeling of newness. Might panic be the nightmarish inversion of this firstness? Firstness as a source of terror?
Pan ultimately takes these questions of subjectivity as seriously as everyday consciousness does, relegating them to an unsophisticated transitional period, to sophomoric navel-gazing. They are the kinds of thoughts “that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama,” as Christian Lorentzen wrote in his review of the novel. We’re not supposed to entertain such questions⎯“Exactly what, I thought, is UNCONSCIOUSNESS? And HOW could I just LET IT HAPPEN?”⎯after a certain age. Is that because we have their answers? Considering that much of Western philosophy has dedicated itself to elucidating the singularity of consciousness for centuries without success, it’s doubtful. But they must be dropped to move through the world. Like Nick’s apperception of the edges of his vision⎯“a stray strand of [his] dark hair, the flesh-colored shadow of [his] nose”⎯which causes panicky flare-ups, such questions get in the way. Nick, who assures us that despite his sensitivity he remains a “pragmatist,” wants to understand his panic attacks, initially and later when he’s become disenchanted, in order to control them.
Pan ironizes these questions with the Cult of Pan. Once Nick is initiated into “the barn” he is hounded by questions about his illness before, he thinks, they could have known about it: “Tell us what your thoughts feel like.” It’s a remarkable coincidence in a book too full of them. Ian, the oldest, urges Nick to take his panic insights seriously (“Instead of trying to flee from the clarity of panic thoughts [. . .] dwell with them”) before using them to create a pseudo-cult, complete with a theory of hollow and solid minds, a holiday called Belt Day, and a ritual involving the battering of a mouse. It turns out the cult is Ian’s method of manipulating Nick and his girlfriend Sarah. Ian repurposes Nick’s proximity to Sarah⎯caught between the two boys, Sarah has been feeding Ian information⎯for the meaning of his illness in a series of dictums, classifications, and occult rites. Clune has said Nick is more or less autobiographical, and the supporting players largely based on people he grew up with. The cult of the barn is mostly where the fiction comes in, and you can tell.
The medical response would be to call it “mental illness,” Generalized Anxiety Disorder, specifically. Nick is given a paper bag. The panic attacks cease. He suffers insomnia, and this ceases, too. The Cult of Pan is exposed, following which Nick loses interest in the mystification of his panic. But those feelings of estrangement, manic containment, paranoia, and seeing things for the first time linger on. (Genuine strangeness is, unfortunately, not always distinguishable from the everyday tedium of the coincidental.) Like Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, Nick is “learning to see.” His thoughtful, eccentric descriptions constitute the finest writing in Pan. Working at Ace Hardware, Nick imagines its atmosphere has seeped into every corner of his life, “fantasiz[ing] a sound or a color brash and big and bold enough to punch a hole in Ace’s substance. But it didn’t take [him] long to realize that brash and big and bold was Ace’s substance.” There is a protracted riff on the color of sixties television: “The sky in Gilligan’s Island isn’t the color of the sky outside, and it’s not the color of the sky in eighties television.” The hyper focus of panic survives in these perceptions, which, in their mystic deadpan, are frequently Joy Williams-esque.
These perceptions, in turn, lead Nick toward art, at which point Pan begins to look like a küntslerroman, with its accretion of experiences, sentimental and aesthetic, that make later writing possible; that is, writing about those experiences in the very book you hold in your hands. His aesthetic education is provided by what is at hand in these “vast suburban distances”: a once-assigned copy of Ivanhoe, the paintings on a friend’s sibling’s wall, The Flowers of Evil at Barnes & Noble. When he listens to Bach, Nick doesn’t see Baroque scenes, but Roman ones. These chance encounters⎯the culmination being his gift of Swann’s Way to a friend on house arrest at the barn⎯achieve a stylistic balance between high and low that constitutes much of the novel’s charm. If the juxtaposition of the exalted with the suburban is sometimes comic, it’s also a provocation. Is transcendence impossible? “There are mystical places and times of the year in the American suburbs,” Nick says. This balance isn’t always maintained, however. At times Clune’s characters use a sophisticated vocabulary that, drawn from continental philosophy, is only thinly veiled. Ian: “When you are aware of the panic, you are seeing the truth of ordinary life.” Nick: “I saw that time was a part of the body after all.” This can give the impression we’re in a novel of ideas, that Clune has dressed up his theoretical concerns in teenage clothes; the fate of the barn crew, for example, is left murky, as if it were inessential to the plot. Elsewhere, Pan seems, maybe out of Midwestern politeness, embarrassed of these concerns: “Chill out!” Nick tells himself. “If you stare long enough at anything it’ll look weird.”
Nick begins his “redescriptions,” a writing practice meant to “transform the panic thoughts⎯turn them into something else.” This succeeds for a while, and, despite a pointless detour into easel painting at the eleventh hour, the redescriptions seem the obvious path forward (the path toward Pan). Nick may re-channel this awkward period of revelation into an aesthetic life, may go on to teach at a university and publish novels, but Pan will return. It may be the gods, or the primal experiences they were invented to describe, never left us. We’ve only to learn to hear them again.