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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.
"Evocative and erudite...The narrative barrels toward a frightening and enigmatic ending. This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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." —Kirkus Reviews
"No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, there's nothing left but changeling magic. I didn't want the book to end, and I'm still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare." —Blake Butler, author of Molly
"This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick, and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia, and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages." —Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts
This information about Pan was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune's work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper's Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
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