It’s for dorks

There’s​ a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama. Nicholas, the book’s narrator, is that sort of kid. He goes on to talk about a four-year-old girl found dead of exposure in a Chicago housing project, whom he learned about through a friend’s stepfather, a police officer also in possession of photographs of the interior of Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment (‘pictures the newspapers never got’). It’s the 1990s, the heyday of US serial killers, before they passed the mantle to mass shooters. When it comes to class, things are in flux: ‘They shut that housing project down, farmed the residents out into town houses.’ Nick lives in such a town house with his father, having been kicked out of his mother’s place not long after the couple’s divorce for being ‘out of control’. Chariot Courts, where he now lives, is not ‘the worst in terms of low-grade housing’, but it’s nonetheless a ‘battleground between the idea of home and the armies of impermanence’. We aren’t in the suburban idyll of the 1950s but a zone of displacement, scarcity and desolation during America’s last boom decade.

It’s not all so terrible. Nick has a friend called Ty, an African American classmate at the local Catholic high school, and the two of them exchange theories of coolness and the importance of being good at sport. We can tell that they’re outsiders, though not rejects. Ty’s father is a doctor and his mother is a ‘feminist’, as well as one of the few adults Nick knows who reads books. We learn little about Nick’s parents. His father is a lonely divorced man who occasionally takes his son to movies, makes sure he gets to school and brings him to the doctor when necessary. What he does for a living is unclear but it involves early mornings, some travelling and frequent absences for which he apologises. Nick’s mother is a Russian immigrant who runs a cleaning business. She’s not very present in the novel either, but she looms like a spectre who would pay more attention than his father does to Nick’s problems, flaws and transgressions were she around to notice them. Towards the end of the book, after a year and a half has passed, he moves back in with his mother and younger brother. Her house is grander, set on a hill with a large lawn, a long driveway and a brick walkway to the front door. ‘To the casual observer, the place emanated spaciousness, privacy, rest, elegance,’ but being on top of a hill exposes it to the brutal Chicago winds. When the wind subsides it’s even worse. You hear the sound of a highway you can’t see: ‘Now – standing on mom’s property that very first day and remembering how to listen, catching the knack, hearing the highway inside the wind, it’s like riding a bike – I understood. I understood why for me the fear of almost falling asleep took the form of the fear of being hit by a speeding car.’

This realisation is a bit more sophisticated than ‘the raw death of the endless future’ we heard about in the novel’s opening pages. It follows a long digression on the highway as ‘the ultimate public place of American civilisation’, and so when you can hear the highway from your bedroom, sleep itself ‘is a highway’ and therefore also ‘a public place’, but not necessarily a safe one. A lot has happened in the eighteen months between these epiphanies. Clune has traced three strands of Nick’s development. There are the familiar episodes of a Bildungsroman: first love and sex; initiation into a new group of friends; youthful American rites such as trying to obtain a big bottle of vodka before the Fourth of July. Then there’s the thing that sets Nick apart, his panic attacks, heightened states of consciousness and anxiety that give the novel its name and frame its action as well as his own evolving self-understanding. Intertwined with both is his transformation into a reader and a writer. The last is a slow process: reading is at first a way to protect his consciousness by giving it something to focus on. He realises it has this effect when he stays up all night reading Ivanhoe; on finishing the book he ‘walked downstairs and told Dad that I was having a heart attack’.

This is the third of Nick’s panic attacks. It lands him in hospital, where a diagnosis is offered beyond his own idiosyncratic and terrifying notions of what’s happening to him. The first attack comes on in geometry class when he sees his hand on his desk next to his textbook – ‘my hand, I realise slowly, it’s a … thing’ – and forgets how to breathe. The second occurs at the cinema with his father snoring next to him, just before and during the scene in The Godfather Part III where Michael Corleone has an attack of his own and is diagnosed with diabetes: ‘This time what I forgot was how to move blood through my body.’ At the hospital, no remedy is forthcoming beyond instructions to exhale into a paper bag. He wants to know what’s causing him to panic, a question that will structure the rest of the novel. The doctors tell him it ‘could be anything’. Here, Nick reflects, ‘philosophical questions about quasi-diseases give way to the urgency of actual, vivid, outside-the-body blood, in large amounts. Pulseless wrists, severed legs. Prestigious, respectable conditions with absolutely unfakeable symptoms.’

The defamiliarisation Clune employs when Nick describes his attacks is a variation on the blunt lyricism that won him acclaim for his memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013). Though the specifics of addiction memoirs are sometimes interesting, the cycle of getting hooked and getting clean has become a cliché: the first rush, the increasing compulsion, the desperate measures, the slumming to score, the pain of withdrawal, the climbing on and falling off the wagon until the demon has been tamed. It was Clune’s language that distinguished his book, the way he turned compulsion into a colour (hence the title) or withdrawal into something kinetic: ‘I shoved myself up against unconsciousness, trying desperately to get in. Sleep. Dreamless, motionless, senseless. It was like the cold plaster wall. I could feel the good absence of feeling on it. I pressed my burning limbs against it. But it was closed. A wall, not a door. I pressed up against it, awake at fourteen hours.’

Clune’s drug addiction developed during his twenties when he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, picking up around Baltimore like an extra on The Wire. He’s now a professor of English literature at Ohio State University and the author of three scholarly works, as well as a second memoir, Gamelife (2015), which recounts the obsession with computer games he developed after his family acquired a Commodore 64 in the 1980s. The two memoirs together with Pan – which is autobiographical, though there are some deviations from his life (Clune is the child of Irish immigrants, and his younger sibling is a sister) – form a trilogy about the derangements of youth. Heroin wrecks Clune’s love life and pushes him into an underground world. He describes gaming as a way of ‘growing away’ from people. It’s not as pernicious as drug addiction, but there’s a social cost. At one point he suggests playing Dungeons & Dragons to a friend. ‘It’s for dorks,’ the friend replies. ‘Everyone at school would make fun of us. Everyone on the basketball team. Elizabeth would break up with me.’ All three conditions – heroin addiction, compulsive gaming and debilitating panic attacks – are isolating, things one would rather keep secret.

When Nick arrives late to school and enters through the wrong door with his paper bags, a nun accuses him of coming to steal things: ‘Those bags won’t be empty when you leave.’ But the bags give him a sense of security, reassurance that he’ll have a way of calming himself down if he hears a word like ‘diabetes’ that suddenly sets him off. He begins to sense some compensations from his panic; for instance, he might have the power of prophecy. In an audacious moment he passes a note to a girl called Sarah in his class: ‘SPRING HAS STARTED.’ She passes it back: ‘YES.’ He plots this as a win on his ‘VICTORY/ DEFEAT’ axis (teenage boys have a way of reinventing simple ideas for themselves). Sarah invites him to the fancy house where she’s lived all her life with undivorced parents. They have deep conversations about her favourite band, Boston, and poems she’s written (‘Beauty is a shape open to feeling’). Nick confides in her about his panic attacks and she reacts with gentle curiosity, suggesting that he go to the library to research the condition. The card catalogue leads him to medical volumes and books on financial panics, but he also stumbles across a copy of The Collected Plays of Oscar Wilde. He flips to Salomé and finds an illustration of ‘a thin woman holding a man’s head on a plate’. The image takes him back to his conversation with Sarah and her question about whether he ever felt that he left his own head during a panic attack. Nick and Sarah undertake more research at school under the suspicious glares of the nuns. Wilde points them to ancient Greece and Pan. It seems significant to them that Pan was the god, among other things, of theatrical criticism, and Wilde was a playwright.

All this sleuthing, this naive grasping, suggests that these teenagers might be on the trail of some secret understanding of what’s wrong (or all too right) with Nick. Sarah invites him and Ty into a circle of friends, most of them a little older and all of them richer and cooler than Nick and Ty, who gather at a disused barn on one of their families’ properties. On 1 May the group celebrate ‘Belt Day’ with a ritual that consists of taking their shirts off, painting each other’s torsos, dancing and spinning, drinking from a bottle said to contain a cocktail of ecstasy and ‘herbsbane’, and descending in turns to a crawl space where something will be revealed to them.

At this point, roughly halfway through the book, I suspected (and somewhat hoped) that after a slow build-up the novel might take a sinister turn and that from here the narrative might be given over to a pair of hard-boiled detectives who’d get to the bottom of what was rotten in the Chicago suburbs of the early 1990s. No such luck. Nick, who abstains from the drug potion (because he worries it might bring on a panic attack), goes down into the crawl space and sees a red light at the end of the tunnel – ‘the panic grew stronger than I’d ever felt it before’ – and then a pair of eyes staring at him. He emerges from the tunnel in tears and feeling ‘fucking awesome’, his panic ‘absolutely gone’, to be informed that what he encountered was a mouse.

The narrative​ breaks off and picks up a year later (and becomes something more interesting than a suburban thriller). Sarah is now Nick’s girlfriend. He has a summer job at a hardware store with an all-day soundtrack of easy listening that sets him on edge, particularly ‘Everybody Plays the Fool’ by the Neville Brothers: ‘I’d heard it approximately 32 times per day, five days per week.’ He’s moved on from Wilde to the works of his great-uncle Charles Maturin (specifically the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer), developed a taste for classical music and Italian Renaissance art, and begun to think of the management of his panic attacks in religious terms: grace (the mouse in the tunnel) and works (the paper bags).

In an amusing set piece, Nick and Tod, one of the boys from the barn, attempt to buy a bottle of vodka at a liquor store by sending Nick inside in a wheelchair, claiming to be forty. When the clerk refuses to serve him, he turns desperate: ‘I cannot fucking believe … that you’re going to deny a crippled forty-year-old man alcohol so close to July Fourth.’ The clerk kicks him out and threatens to call the police. ‘I hope you end up in a chair like this one day.’ So much for grace.

It’s a tricky if not quite delicate balancing act for Clune, rendering Nick and his friends as both innocent knuckleheads with corny taste in music and blossoming neurotic intellectuals with homespun theories of the mind and a quickly expanding appreciation of the finer things. Are we in the presence of Socrates and Thrasymachus or Beavis and Butt-Head? On one page Tod is demonically killing a mouse with a shovel; a few pages later Ty is driving Nick home and relating a horrifying incident in which his father slashed his mother’s back with a kitchen knife in a fit of jealousy while Ty played Nintendo in the next room; then, on the following page, the pair argue about bastardised versions of the myth of Sisyphus. It complicates matters that Tod and his brother, Ian, have become more and more menacing since Nick joined the group. Ian, who is older than the others and a junior in college, emerges as a sinister foil to Nick. He also suffers from panic attacks and is given to pontificating on their shared state of lacking ‘solid mind’, unlike the others, who are normal or ‘Hollows’. He suggests that the two of them are hosts for Pan. Sarah allows Ian to sit in a dark room while she and Nick have sex to test his theory about whether Pan might enter a Hollow under certain circumstances. Nick is none too keen when he discovers Ian’s presence.

By now, doctors have diagnosed Nick with generalised anxiety disorder and recommended therapy. Uncannily, a muzak version of ‘Everybody Plays the Fool’ accompanies a session of guided meditation at the doctor’s office, and Nick’s biofeedback read-out is the lowest the doctor has ever seen. Back at the barn, Ian is scathing:

The goal of the therapists is to turn you away from the thoughts of panic, away from the truth of panic, back to ordinary life. But this is impossible … because panic is not an interruption of ordinary life, the way asthma or diabetes is an interruption of ordinary life. When ordinary life is at its fullest, when it is most truly itself – just then does panic arise. Just as the moon rises.

For a spell in the second half of the novel, Nick begins to sound like his strident guru, especially on the topic of sleep: ‘Anyone who says they don’t want to die … and yet allows themselves to fall asleep each night is worse than a fool. They are traitors to consciousness.’ The rant continues for almost three pages, but increasingly Nick is torn between wanting a clinical remedy for his strained, overloaded consciousness and a mystical understanding or amplification of it. ‘Panic is absolute clarity,’ Ian instructs. Finally, after a long night of Ian’s ranting, his voyeurism and his instigation of the mouse killings, Nick has had enough. ‘Ian’s a maniac,’ he tells Ty. When Ty suggests that Nick takes things too seriously, he responds: ‘You would too if you had this fucking mental illness or whatever it is that no one seems to know how to fix.’

The logical place for a serious young man to go is deeper into art, music and literature. Nick ventures beyond Wilde and Ivanhoe to Bach, Giotto and Baudelaire. He and Sarah read from Les Fleurs du mal and discuss it ‘without using Ian’s language … words we’d tacitly agreed to reject’. He explains what it makes possible for him:

Baudelaire taught me how to have new thoughts, to transform the panic thoughts – turn them into something else … The fabrication of new shapes for my mind to move into … Not escapism. Not like video games. Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer.

When Nick alights on Proust in the course of his daily writing practice, which involves the ritual of sitting cross-legged in meditation and breathing self-consciously with a notebook on the floor in front of him, he learns a mode of ‘redescription’ for the narrative of his life. Clune is also describing his own writing process and the book we are reading, one that has a didactic and therapeutic purpose beyond the story it tells, though of a sort so thoroughly idiosyncratic as to defy any comparison to self-help. In its final pages one strand of the narrative ends, as the group from the barn disbands. Some of the teenagers drift into trouble; others become ambitious; the rest settle into ordinary lives of barbecues and ball games. The two other strands of the novel come together, as Nick learns to tame the secret workings of his mind with the discipline of a writer: ‘I will fall asleep tonight, I vowed, in my redescription of this very moment.’