The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune\u2019s first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so\u00a0cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It\u2019s a place exposed to \u201cthe raw death of the endless future, which at night in the\u00a0midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs\u201d. Just as frightening is Nicholas\u2019s sense that \u201canything can come in\u201d. One day in January, what comes into Nicholas is the god Pan \u2013 a\u00a0possessing, deranging, life-threatening spirit. Or that, anyhow, is how Nicholas comes to interpret his increasingly disabling anxiety.<\/p>\n
Pan is remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I\u2019ve read how\u00a0these can be experienced as black magic \u2013 indeed, it allows that they might be black magic. Nicholas successfully prophesies trivial events (the wind rising, someone saying the word \u201cdiabetes\u201d) and is haunted by a dead mouse\u2019s squeak. Another boy finds a means of divination in a schlock fantasy novel. Even the pop anthem More Than a Feeling is a path to the uncanny; it\u2019s a song with \u201ca door in the middle of it \u2026 like the door on a UFO\u201d. Nicholas becomes convinced that he is perpetually at risk of leaving his body \u2013 specifically, that his \u201clooking\/thinking could pour or leap out\u201d of his head \u2013 and his friends, also being 15 years old, are ready to believe it, too. They are easy prey for Ian, a college-age man who sets himself up as a small-time cult leader among these high-school kids. Ian particularly targets Nicholas, telling him that only they are capable of real thoughts; the others in the group are \u201cHollows\u201d who have \u201cSolid Mind\u201d, a\u00a0deterministic mentality with no animating self. \u201cThe sound of words from a Hollow mouth,\u201d says Ian, \u201ccontains an abyss.\u201d Soon the group is staging rituals incorporating sex, drugs and animal sacrifice.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has experienced mental illness \u2013 and many who have just been 15 years old \u2013 will find Pan uncannily familiar<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Nicholas loses his ability to sleep and spirals toward psychosis. Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows. Falling out of your face can be transcendence, but can also represent extinction. When Nicholas sees a black-and-white photograph of a group of long-dead priests, he reflects: \u201cNow they\u2019d all stepped out of their faces \u2026 The faces hung there like rows of empty sneakers in a shop window. The priests had stepped out.\u201d At his hardware-store job, Nicholas sees the racks of garden tools and realises, \u201cThese are animals too \u2026 These are the\u00a0husks, the waiting bodies, the body\u00a0traps of animals.\u201d He knows that if he stares at the hand spades and rotary tillers long enough, he can inhabit them; even household objects\u00a0now have a door in the middle of them. Nicholas\u2019s reality becomes fluid. Among his friends, he becomes the\u00a0object of semi\u2011religious, semi-voyeuristic fascination. What is truly\u00a0remarkable here is that the extravagance feels meticulously true\u00a0to a certain state of altered consciousness. I doubt that anyone has had Nicholas\u2019s exact experiences, or even ones that resemble them in obvious ways. Still, anyone who has experienced mental illness \u2013 and many who have just been 15 years old \u2013 will find even Clune\u2019s most phantasmagoric pages uncannily familiar.<\/p>\n
There are trade-offs to fiction that strives to be honest. Here, one is that the other characters never fully become people. They\u2019re external experiences that inform the way Nicholas relates to\u00a0his own mind, and it\u2019s often very credible that they are \u201cHollows\u201d with no\u00a0real consciousness. This may be a truthful depiction of the isolation characteristic of extreme mental states. It also means the story is unrelentingly solipsistic. The plot centres on inner epiphanies. While these present themselves as life-saving answers, they all turn out to be brief respites, some evanescing so quickly that they\u2019re forgotten seconds later. It\u2019s no surprise that Sisyphus appears as a reference here. This is certainly true both of coping with mental illness and surviving adolescence. It also risks making the reader feel as if we\u2019re going nowhere.<\/p>\n
But this is not really to criticise the book: it\u2019s just to say what it is and isn\u2019t. A reader who approaches Pan expecting the usual rewards of a coming-of-age story will be sorely disappointed. It offers not answers but\u00a0visions; not growth but lambent revelation; not closure but openings. \u201cGood writing,\u201d Nicholas tells us, is \u201cthe careful, painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that [looks] the same, but [is] deeper, more mysterious, richer.\u201d This feels like\u00a0a fair description of Clune\u2019s own process, with the proviso that he is not\u00a0replacing but supplementing; not substituting for reality, but adding to it.\u00a0Nicholas ends his inner journey without arriving at the cure he has been pursuing. But when we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world.<\/p>\n
Pan by Michael Clune is published by Fern Press (\u00a316.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org<\/a>. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune\u2019s first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-13695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}