Pan
By Michael Clune
Penguin, 336 pages, $29
A small but powerful literary sub-genre is the novel of pagan intoxication breaking forth in a modern, secular milieu. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and John Fowles’s The Magus are two such books, both featuring young men in academic settings who are swept away from reason and the values of the Enlightenment by a charismatic leader channeling dangerous Dionysian forces. Both books are reader favorites with high literary merit, but also stand slightly outside the mainstream—as pagan-influenced works that didn’t quite fit with the triumphant secularism of their day. Thus it’s thrilling to see the theme re-appear—dirtied, bruised, and adapted for today’s cultural disintegration—in Pan, a debut novel by Michael Clune.
Clune, a Compact contributor, is the author of White Out, a heroin memoir, and Gamelife, a memoir on playing video-games. His nonfiction suggests a personal familiarity with the wild energies that exhilarate, invade, and capture us. His talent for brilliant organizing metaphors, seen in his earlier works, is also on display in this novel with his usage of the panic attack. In Pan, we meet Nick, a weird high-school sophomore, as he experiences his first such attack while reading Ivanhoe. In hilarious contrast to his sophisticated, Ancient Greek–studying predecessors in The Magus and The Secret History, Nick lives with his dad in a bland suburban development in Illinois and is friends with the local stoners. “My mom kicked me out” is the book’s promising and funny first sentence. He attends a grim Catholic school whose vestigial religion seems not to touch him. He finds it very difficult to pay attention in class, and worries a lot about concealing the brown-paper bag he breathes into to control his attacks.
Clune’s balancing act in the first few chapters is so subtle that at first it seems Pan might be just a high-school novel, though one strangely littered with symbols and charms. Nick has a crush on a girl, and he struggles with the “minor popularity calculations” that are part of high-school life. He’s best friends with Ty, the less-introspective one, whose job is “getting the maximum fun out of the materials at hand without being arrested or expelled”—an excellent description of the life-mission of a certain type of teenage boy. The fantastic motifs arise almost accidentally from the slacker-realist milieu, a more difficult trick than it seems, as when Nick, speculating on the coolness of wearing sunglasses, observes that they are “descended directly from the opaque visors of knights.” Pan is a bildungsroman and a quest novel, and is going someplace stranger still.
When the abnormal begins to intrude, it does so subtly, in the form of Nick’s own weird thoughts. He has meaningless premonitions regarding words, a skill he claims all children have. Or, sitting in a boring class, he zones out staring at “a brick path, thirty or forty feet long, terminating in the middle of a broad field” that’s outside the window. Nick tells us that he finds the path disquieting; the implication of departure and linear progress suggests a certainty to life that he doesn’t feel. A path also implies an orderly progression of time, which Clune, beneath the deceptively calm surface of a generic American high school, is busy undermining. Nick transforms the path in his mind into a pier, and works on seeing it that way instead, and he transforms the field into an ocean. A pier suggests arrivals, he tells us, a pier is all future.
And then, so gradually we can’t pinpoint the moment of transition, the random moments seeded with otherworldly significance begin to grow and take over the story. On one level Nick is a teenage boy having panic attacks; on another he is having an encounter with a kind of sacred wildness that the Greeks characterized as Pan. Nick and his crush, Sarah, go to the library and discover in an encyclopedia that “The word panic is derived from the god Pan, and originally referred to the sudden fear aroused by the presence of a God.” Nick’s encounters with this sacred figure become stranger and more intense after he and his friend Ty follow Sarah into a new druggie new friend group, led by the charismatic older brother of one of their schoolmates. Nick, because of his panic, doesn’t use drugs—he doesn’t need to.
Clune is in his late forties, and the novel is set in the time of his youth, in a hilarious technology ditch I remember well—when no one had cell phones “except for some kids’ fathers, in their cars, attached to their cars.” We didn’t know back then that we were poised in the rubble at the end of Christendom, waiting for a new civilization to arrive (there is a broken marble column in the teenage drug den). At one point, Nick, reflecting on the contrast between his father’s cheap, depressing dwelling, and those of his friends’ parents, describes his society thus: “When there’s nothing solid behind the present moment, when there’s no real past, no tradition, when everything’s basically exposed to the future, everything’s constantly flying away into the hole of the future, money is the next best thing.” In other words, the late ’80s.
In opposition to this cultural wasteland, Clune makes use of—and often seems to deliberately warp the meaning of—music from Bach to Boston, and literature from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé to the 1982 fantasy novel Nifft the Lean. On one level, he’s using them to fight the panic, on another, his vision is an opportunity. “A panic attack doesn’t feel like a panic attack,” he says, “It feels like insight.” Here, Salomé is no Biblical morality play, or even a Wildian embrace of corruption, but bare fact, “a true story” about “the love between a beautiful woman and a living, headless man.” The creative usage of cultural relics is funny, as when Nick reads a biography of Wilde and concludes that it’s “mostly useless. The author didn’t understand Salomé. Not one mention of panic.” But it’s also meaningful; the music and books have their own sacred content and wild energy to exalt or trap the reader.
As the book progresses, Nick’s struggle with panic takes on increasing menace, and the chthonic energies summoned by the friend-group become more sinister. Nick’s experiences are varied, but circle around not knowing what he is, seeing himself from the outside, fearing that he’s going to fall out of his head and face, and feeling that his consciousness is going to dive out somewhere into an unknown—where, we understand, Pan roams. He tries to pull back, but is trapped. The visions aren’t delusions; he is seeing the real. The antidote, perhaps, is to make art of his own.
To discuss the ending would be to ruin an excellent surprise. Suffice it to say that Clune is offering an original and strikingly contemporary metaphysics. There has been much talk recently of an end to the century of autofiction, and much corresponding demand for new literary forms that perhaps resurrect or mix-and-match elements of past traditions but also create something new for the present. That it’s been done by a high-school-stoner novel riffing on Ancient Greece is hilarious and surprising, but perfect.