Pan

Mental Concept, Photograph, © Evan Kaufman

When I was young I said my name into a mirror over and over again until I was unreal. This was when I knew certainty would never roll off my tongue again. Of course, I forgot all that. Then remembered it. And forgot it and remembered it, over and over.

This is more or less the plot of Michael Clune’s new novel, Pan. 15-year-old Nick is having what he’s been told are panic attacks. After a series of small but increasingly worrisome perceptual changes, which include the feeling that everything is strange and that his face might melt and his thoughts might pour out of his head, after a trip to the E.R., where he’s told to breathe into a paper bag when said feelings occur, Nick reflects, “Panic is the opposite of cool. Cool is the relative absence of consciousness” (25).

Pan, Clune’s first novel, is a coming-of-age tale for our apocalyptic Anthrpocene. And so goes roughly three hundred pages and a year and a half of Nick bumming around his Catholic High School, the shoddy late capitalist townhouse he lives in with his dad and the barn, especially the barn, a hangout for his pothead friends (Nick does not indulge) as Nick struggles to come to terms with his own mind and the strange, panic worthy world in which its situated.

Nick learns from the encyclopedia in the school library (the novel is set in the 90s) that “the word panic is derived from the god Pan, and originally referred to the sudden fear aroused by the presence of a god” (76). He visits a psychologist who makes his panic worse by forcing him to listen to bad pop hits rendered into mediation music on a tape deck with a terrible speaker. He tunnels, literally, down into a dark hole under the barn as part of a “Belt Day” ritual his friends set up and comes out the other side temporarily “cured.”  After, he recounts, “the panic was absolutely gone. Not even a trace of it. My thoughts lay smooth and quiet in my head—they moved like…like nothing. They sounded like nothing” (140).  Forgetting.

Then the remembering, as incidents of panic evolve into a generalized anxiety that pervade his days and take him towards some strange and disturbing social turns at the barn. An older brother of a friend whose been kicked out of college for threatening behavior of an unspecified variety towards his girlfriend, Ian, is both oddly insightful and menacing. He suggests mediation might help Nick come to some new understanding of his distress then turns around and recruits Nick’s girlfriend, Sarah, to seduce Nick and transfer the panic to her through sex while he watches.

It's at this turn that Nick reaches his lowest point and the reader is left to wonder what dark hell Nick’s panic might lure him into and if he’ll survive it. Here, the tension in the story of consciousness also peaks. Clune’s tone throughout the book is comedic and satirical and this helps to both blunt and sharpen what seem to be in Nick both a legitimate awakening and the potential for that awakening to tip into a disreality and disorientation he may not escape.

As Nick understands early in the book, mental illness is a concept, “...that would make sense of the weird thing that happened to me. A concept that would quickly dispel the cloud of mystery that clung to the morning’s events” (25). Both the mystery and the sense making are essential to Nick’s unfolding experience and if there is a moral tale in Pan, this may be it.