Pan

A courageous teenager explores the roots of his anxiety in the evocative and erudite first novel by memoirist Clune (Gamelife). Fifteen-year-old Nick has moved into his dad's condo in suburban Chicago. His parents are divorced, and his mother thinks he needs his father. But his father's never there, so after Nick has his first panic attack, he embarks on a lonely quest to discover where his anxiety comes from. After his third episode, he checks into the hospital, where a doctor teaches him to cope by breathing into a paper bag. His visits to a psychiatrist and a therapist are epic failures, so he turns to literature, discovering that the word panic comes from the name of the god Pan. His friend Sarah takes him to meet a group of kids who hang out in a barn near the house of brothers Ian and Tod. Wasted most of the time, the group toys with the idea that Nick's panic and angst are magical, and Pan has gotten inside him. On the other hand, Nick's friend Ty wonders if it isn't because of his "familylessness," so Nick adds his parents' divorce to the litany of causes. Unable to sleep, he begins to write as a form of therapy ("I'll write all of this, so it's mine"). Clune unfurls breathtaking pages-long descriptions of Nick's disordered thinking, and as Nick faces the limits of writing as therapy, the narrative barrels toward a frightening and enigmatic ending. This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake. (July)

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 readsIvanhoe 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'tlike other people.") To that end, the digressions are sometimes more intriguing than the story, as Nick studies up on Oscar Wilde's playSalome 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 likeLess 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.