{"id":25817,"date":"2025-07-21T09:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T09:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/25817\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T09:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T09:59:08","slug":"the-impish-modernism-of-michael-clune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/25817\/","title":{"rendered":"The Impish Modernism of Michael Clune"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books & the Arts<\/a><\/p>\n

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\n July 21, 2025<\/p>\n

In Pan, his debut novel, he makes the unruly mind of a teenager the stuff of high art. <\/p>\n

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The comedian Marty Feldman as Pan in Every Home Should Have One, 1969.<\/p>\n

(Ron Burton \/ Mirrorpix \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Acommon knock against contemporary novels is that they\u2019re written with Hollywood in mind, briskly paced books built for easy adaptation to screen. What\u2019s disappearing, it\u2019s been argued, is the very quality that makes fiction unique among narrative mediums: direct access to the insides of characters\u2019 brains. This may explain the enduring popularity of Jonathan Franzen\u2019s densely interior social realism. But for all the psychological depth of his novels, Franzen is a fundamentally conventional stylist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The early-20th-century high modernists\u2014Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner\u2014didn\u2019t just foreground interiority; they also pioneered techniques designed to represent what consciousness feels like. Michael Clune channels this tradition (among others) in Pan, his debut novel about a teenage boy who becomes convinced that the Greek god Pan holds squatter\u2019s rights inside his brain. A metaphysical horror story cloaked in the guise of a K\u00fcnstlerroman, Pan is ultimately about the nature of subjectivity and the loneliness of living in the fortress of one\u2019s own, unruly mind.<\/p>\n

Clune, a professor at Case Western Reserve University, has published five previous books\u2014two memoirs and three works of scholarship. The writer Ben Lerner has cited Writing Against Time, Clune\u2019s academic study of literature that attempts to \u201carrest the flow of neurobiological time,\u201d as a major influence on his work.<\/p>\n

Of those books, the most well-known is White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin<\/a>, which documents Clune\u2019s descent into addiction in Baltimore while he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the early 2000s. Released in 2013 by Hazelden Publishing, a small press imprint of a recovery nonprofit, White Out was an unexpected success, drawing praise from The New Yorker and elsewhere. A 2024 reissue by McNally Editions includes a new foreword by the author\u2014and a blurb from yours truly, in which I compare Clune to James Joyce.<\/p>\n

Proust, in retrospect, would have been more apt. For Clune, addiction is a \u201cmemory disease\u201d; like Proust\u2019s madeleine, the mere sight of a vial of heroin transports him back to his euphoric first taste of the drug. Clune has no use for the bromides and redemption arcs that afflict bestselling recovery memoirs or the soft sociology found in general nonfiction. His concerns are primarily phenomenological. White Out\u2019s subject isn\u2019t heroin but Clune\u2019s subjective experience of being addicted to it.<\/p>\n

Clune is drawn to sense-warping experiences that upend the frameworks through which we view the world. Pan begins with one such occurrence: its 15-year-old narrator\u2019s first panic attack. It\u2019s January 1990, and Nick lives with his divorced dad in a sad bachelor apartment in the outlying Chicago suburb of Libertyville, Illinois. Sitting in math class, he comes to the terrifying realization that his hand is \u201ca \u2026 thing.\u201d Then he forgets how to breathe: \u201cI was sucking in too much air or I wasn\u2019t breathing enough out. The rhythm was all wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That episode passes, but after two repeat instances, Nick\u2019s dad takes him to the ER. There, a doctor tells Nick that these aren\u2019t heart attacks but panic attacks. He should breathe into a paper bag if it happens again. Nick returns to school armed with three brown bags, though they\u2019ve gone soggy with sweat from being clutched in his clammy palms. He attempts to dry them in the bathroom with a hand dryer, prompting yet another attack. Lo and behold, the breathing trick works.<\/p>\n

Buoyed by the success of this simple cure, Nick goes to class, claims diarrhea as the cause of his earlier absence, and passes a note to Sarah, his auburn-haired crush. The note states, simply: \u201cSPRING HAS STARTED.\u201d Surprisingly, this earns him Sarah\u2019s number, and an invitation to her house. She takes Nick down to her older brother\u2019s basement bedroom, where they listen to records and bond over their shared belief that Boston\u2019s \u201cMore Than a Feeling\u201d is a profoundly transcendent work of art. Sarah closes her eyes and recites part of a poem she\u2019s written. In a reciprocal show of vulnerability, Nick tells her about his panic attacks, then proceeds to have one. He breathes into a bag, diffusing both the attack and the sexual tension. The next day, Nick and Sarah head to the library to research his condition. They discover that the word panic comes from the Greek god Pan.<\/p>\n

The next time Nick sees Sarah, it\u2019s in a barn owned by the family of a rich kid named Tod. In true rich-kid form, Tod has access to drugs via a charismatic and possibly sociopathic older brother, Ian. Worried that marijuana might induce an attack, Nick fakes inhaling when a bong comes his way. Tod asks why Nick is pretending to smoke, suggesting that it\u2019s because he doesn\u2019t have a \u201csolid mind,\u201d which Ian then describes as thoughts that \u201cflow in grooves, built deep into your brain.\u201d They\u2019re stoned and fucking with him, but they\u2019re also correct; during panic attacks, Nick feels like his head is a diving board from which his thoughts might leap. He imagines them dripping down the lunchroom walls.<\/p>\n

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Despite the hazing, Nick and his friend Ty return to the barn, where Ian leads the group in a \u201cBelt Day\u201d celebration\u2014a pseudo-pagan bacchanal involving LSD (Nick abstains), body painting, and live mice. Nick and Sarah have sex, which he describes as a \u201csavage smile\u201d opening inside them and tearing through them both as if they\u2019re \u201cone single balloon.\u201d When the school year ends, Nick gets a job at a hardware store where the Neville Brothers\u2019 \u201cEverybody Plays the Fool\u201d plays 14 times per shift, driving him further into madness. He begins to fear sleep and vows to avoid it. A few days later, a bleary-eyed Nick delivers an impassioned monologue to the denizens of the barn, proposing that \u201cthose who fall into the abyss of consciousness every night\u201d live lives \u201cperforated by death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nick\u2019s father sends him to a psychologist, who diagnoses him with generalized anxiety disorder. Ian\u2014who\u2019s been suspended from college for supposedly terrorizing his girlfriend, and has taken so many drugs that \u201cthe dude is drugs\u201d\u2014has another theory: Pan is using Nick\u2019s brain as a host. For Ian, this isn\u2019t something to reject but to embrace. \u201cPanic is absolute clarity,\u201d he tells Nick, a Greek god in your ear shouting, \u201cWake up! These thoughts are sacred\u2014this presence in you\u2014sacred\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

In Writing Against Time, Clune makes a distinction between classical and Romantic views of posterity. Whereas the classical poets aimed to preserve their names and deeds through art that would last across centuries, the Romantics had loftier aspirations: to trap discrete instants of raw sensation in their verse. By his own admission, Clune is not a historicist scholar; he draws connections between seemingly disparate traditions largely based on vibes. Clune bundles the writers he admires\u2014Proust, Nabokov, John Ashbery\u2014beneath the broad umbrella of the Romantics despite the fact that their work postdates the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, et al. by a century or more. He roots the group\u2019s guiding objective in another unlikely confrere, the early Christian theologian St. Augustine: \u201cWho can lay hold of the heart and give it fixity, so that for some little moment it may be stable, and for a fraction of time may grasp the splendor of a constant eternity?\u201d<\/p>\n

Clune suggests that while repetition dulls perception, a person\u2019s first exposure to any new set of stimuli heightens reality, slowing time to a sticky drip. It would stand to reason that hormone-jacked teenagers\u2014and especially those prone to panic attacks\u2014see and feel more intensely than sense-dulled adults. \u201cWhen you\u2019re fifteen, your body and mind are still tied to nature,\u201d Nick reflects. \u201cThe seasons start inside you. God fashions the new season out of interior materials. You discover the season, now you\u2019re performing it. You\u2019re winter, you\u2019re spring. And the things around start to mimic you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clune clearly locates himself within this big-tent Romantic tradition, and if his prose sometimes shades purple, then that\u2019s the trade-off for passages that glimpse at Augustine\u2019s splendor, such as this description of reaching for Sarah\u2019s hand when Nick first sees her at the barn:<\/p>\n

Her hand swung back as mine swung forward and our fingers brushed. In that slow half-second, I felt every cell of the warm quarter inch of her finger against mine. Time stretched\u2014the cells beat, and breathed, and moved\u2014I wondered how feeling comes and goes in the body\u2014how feeling breathes and moves in a shape of the body, like dust in a sunbeam\u2014then her hand swung forward again and she ducked through the low door and we were there.<\/p>\n

The bigger challenge with this kind of novel\u2014and one that Clune the critic would surely anticipate\u2014is that sustained immersion in the headspace of a self-absorbed teen can be exhausting. For the most part, humor keeps the tedium at bay. The image of Nick drying his \u201cmedical\u201d paper bags in the boys\u2019 bathroom is very funny, as is his fumbling his first date with Sarah. There\u2019s dramatic irony at work here; the reader sees the absurdity of these situations, even if they\u2019re deadly serious to Nick. But Pan is claustrophobic by design, a novel that seeks to simulate a prolonged panic spiral. At one point, Nick describes panic as \u201can excess of consciousness,\u201d and that surplus is felt on the page. There\u2019s only so much raw sensation one can take.<\/p>\n

Things start to sour for Nick. First, Sarah and Ian conspire to see if she can somehow transfer Pan from Nick\u2019s head to hers by opening her eyes really widely during sex. It doesn\u2019t work. When the lights flick on to reveal that Ian\u2019s been watching, Nick feels betrayed and leaves in a huff. He later returns to the barn to find Tod and Ian smashing mice with a shovel. Blood spatters against Ian\u2019s glasses, and Nick decides he\u2019s done with these guys. Another epiphany: Pan didn\u2019t cause his panic attacks, his parents\u2019 divorce did! Nick reads Baudelaire\u2019s Flowers of Evil and learns to neutralize his anxious thoughts by writing them down, creating a \u201clevel of the world invulnerable to panic.\u201d Though Nick feared the prospect of his thoughts\u2019 leaping wildly from his diving-board brain, he discovers that a purge can be cathartic if it\u2019s properly controlled. His sleep improves.<\/p>\n

Clune might have ended his novel here, with our hero learning to churn his neuroses into poetry: A Portrait of the Artist as Young Insomniac. Instead, things take a darker turn. The book\u2019s final pages seem to suggest that art is an insufficient refuge from the storms inside our brains. This may be so, but as a tool for tracking those storms it\u2019s unparalleled. Discussing Proust in Writing Against Time, Clune proposes: \u201cThe fountain of youth gushes in other people\u2019s skulls; art opens those skulls to us.\u201d In Pan, Clune offers unrestricted entry to the interior landscape of a disturbed American teen. If at times I wanted to claw my way out of Nick\u2019s psyche, that\u2019s a testament to how deeply Clune mines it. Pan pries Nick\u2019s skull open. Beware of what\u2019s inside.<\/p>\n

Adam Wilson<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Wilson is the author of four books, including the forthcoming novel Fail Sons. His is essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in Harper\u2019s Magazine, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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