PAN

An adolescent tries to wrap his head around the source and meaning of his panic attacks.

The first novel by Clune is an autofiction inspired by his teenage anxiety. As the story opens, 15-year-old Nick’s parents have recently divorced and he’s living with his father in a spare apartment in the Chicago suburbs. He’s soon hyperaware of his unconscious bodily functions—breathing, blood flow—and is consumed by fear that they’ll shut down without his attention. For a time, his mind is warped by funhouse logic—maybe if he reads Ivanhoe without stopping, that’ll help?—until he gets a formal diagnosis. But the treatment (breathing into a paper bag) is embarrassing and unsatisfying, and soon he’s gathering with a new set of friends in a rural barn where he gets high, discovers sex, and contemplates the mythical roots of his affliction (i.e., the Greek god Pan of the book’s title). Plotwise, little happens in the novel, which covers roughly a year in his life, but Nick’s narration is intriguingly complex, capturing his desperation to keep his mind intact, while discovering that the quirkiness of his thinking is appealing to his newfound set of outcast peers. (“If you’re not like other people, it’s cool with us,” one tells him. “We don’t like other people.”) To that end, the digressions are sometimes more intriguing than the story, as Nick studies up on Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and he commiserates with a classmate on the finer points of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” Nick’s deadpan delivery, adolescent cohort, and cultural savvy evokes Brat Pack novels like Less Than Zero, and Clune’s book has similar shortcomings—an overly studied blankness, a lack of fullness of characterization. But as a mood piece, it offers a vivid sense of a boy all but asphyxiating on his own thoughts.

A sly and artful bildungsroman.