More Than a Feeling

Pan by Michael Clune. Penguin Press, 336 pages. 2025.

In third grade I entertained, for months, the notion that I could turn invisible. After all, I could often get through a whole school day without evidence that anyone saw me or knew I’d shown up. Nor, on such days, did anyone actually speak to me—except when I spoke in class (which I did, often). I already knew that fictional kids could turn invisible, intangible, or telepathic, like the members of the X-Men or the Legion of Super-Heroes. Against these factors I set what I knew about physics, chemistry, and falsifiability (a phrase I, in third grade, would absolutely have used): I ended up siding with physical law.

What if I had instead stuck with my hypothesis? What if I made it all the way to high school believing I might have powers—invisibility, prophecy, visions—that set me apart or put me in danger? What if I then encountered a charismatic older boy who told me we were special, and told me that and other people weren’t totally real, and told me that we few superior, supernatural outcasts—let’s say, he and I, and my best friend, and his girlfriend, and my girlfriend, and a few other kids—had to do whatever he said?

If all those events had occurred, in that order, I might have ended up like Nick, the alienated, anxious teenage narrator of Michael Clune’s first novel, Pan. Nick begins at age fifteen with panic attacks, insomnia, and unpopularity: by sixteen he gets so caught up in his own ruminations that he feels as if his vision could “pass through walls.” Literary scholars know Clune, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, for his writing on time and modernism (he thinks that modernist writers tried to stop time, while classical ones sought immortality) or for his defenses of critical judgment. Other readers know White Out, his memoir about his years using heroin (which also stops time, while you’re using), or Gamelife, his later memoir about (what else?) video games.

Clune-heads will recognize, amid Nicholas’s believably teenage vocabulary, his creator’s usual subjects: the sense that your mind might not work like everyone else’s; the way that insight or rumination—or maybe it’s just mental illness—can seem to stop time and take us out of this world; the pull of extremes; and the dangerous sense of belonging to an elect. Nicholas finds these notions—both scary and wonderful—in his panic attacks, in the “Generalized Anxiety Disorder” (a therapist’s term) he develops afterward, and in the literary discoveries that he and his girlfriend Sarah make.

Affliction becomes revelation, as insomnia, alienation, and glimpses of another world draw Nick, Sarah, and Nick’s pal Ty to a barn outside town and to a handful of older kids led by Ian, who has developed a whole theory about Solid Minds, Hollow Minds, and spirit possession. (I suspect Ian, who never does drugs, takes his name from straight-edge singer Ian MacKaye; if I were MacKaye, I would not enjoy the comparison.) Nick, of course, wants to believe any version that skews his afflictions as revelations: no wonder he winds up inventing two successive semi-private religions, the First and the Second Church of Pan.

Nick’s earnest attempts to make sense of his feelings amid the unrewarding Illinois exurbs give the novel its coiled, ruminative energy; they are of a piece with Clune’s critical writings too. The visions of Pan amid panic might give Nick’s “ordinary reality . . . the perspective of a different kind of being. A being that sees time all at once.” Like certain drugs and certain poems, the panic attacks give Nick “the feeling that I could come out of my body.”

Sometimes Nick feels compelled to write down his discoveries; sometimes he has to breathe into a paper bag. As in the visionary intrusions that characterize the prose of Virginia Woolf and Janet Frame, Nick’s out-of-body transcendence overlaps with out-of-body medical emergencies: “a panic attack doesn’t feel like a panic attack. It feels like insight.” How can you tell an epiphany from a breakdown? The truth—as so many saints’ lives show (Teresa of Avila; Dymphna)—is that you can’t.

If some declarations seem inseparable from Clune’s grown-up ideas, others grow indissolubly from adolescence. “When you’re fifteen, your body and mind are still tied to nature,” Nick muses. “The seasons start inside you. . . . You’re winter, you’re spring. And the things around you start to mimic you. It’s why the change in seasons feels like prophecy.” Keats fans, take note. Nick wonders, and never quite decides, whether he wants to let Pan in or shut Pan out, “keeping Pan under control.” Anybody who has witnessed the confused epiphanies of mental illness will recognize this deadlock.

Other ideas Nick pursues seem familiar because (as the novel knows) they’re standard accoutrements of modern adolescence. “Where do thoughts come from, anyway? Who am I?” Nick starts by wondering how and whether we know that other people are real. Of course we can’t know for sure—that’s the famous philosophical problem of other minds. If you’re newly aware of that problem, and you’re having visions of divinity, it’s easy to believe that you’re divine and that other people just don’t matter. That’s the hypothesis Nick entertains, and it makes him a ripe recruit for Ian’s chosen few. As for other people, “Hollows” (Ian’s term for normies), NPCs, the un-chosen? They don’t matter. We’re the sacred Elect, the celebrants of “Belt Day” (the barn cult’s Midwestern version of Beltane). We even sacrifice mice.

Interiorized, teen-appropriate language, the moments of vision that make Nick, and Clune, and Pan, stand out, come thick and fast early on. These moments sit, like plastic transparencies from old-school classrooms, atop anxieties over what anyone would call teen mental health issues, beside adults’ quick fixes, like the paper bag (which works) or Dr. Crawford’s “biofeedback monitor” (not so much). Readers of this magazine may have noticed Clune’s public support for Ohio’s SB 1, which bans diversity requirements in the Buckeye State’s public universities (Case Western is private). Clune’s advocacy there has no obvious bearing on his novel.

Other forms of advocacy do. If you follow disability activists and historians, you’ll already know the contrast between medical and social models. In the former, something’s wrong with you: you have—or are—a problem. In the latter, a better society shows, or could show, no problem. These models, in practice, can work hand in hand. If you can’t climb stairs, you might need help from doctors, but the world certainly needs lifts, curb cuts, and ramps. What’s best, and maybe what’s newest, about Clune’s book are the moments when panic attacks, rumination, loneliness, and anxiety speak not just to each other but to Nick’s own existential model: What if he’s got, not panic attacks, but Nietzschean insights, visitations from time-warping, space-shredding divinity? What would it mean to say that he’s got both?

These questions make the first half of the novel shine, exemplified by its explicit soundtrack, the progressive rock band Boston’s 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling,” which Sarah and Nick contemplate at length. Here Clune’s teen dialogue rocks.

“That song,” she said. “It’s not, like, solid.”

She closed her eyes, concentrating. Shook her head in wonder.

“The song has like literally got a door in the middle of it,” Sarah says. “When the guitars go up—dum dum dee dee dum—ok? The whole song like opens in the middle. It’s a door in the middle of the song, like the door on a UFO, right?”

“That’s why you can never get tired of it,” I interjected.

They’re not wrong. They’re also looking at the famous cover for Boston’s first album, with its sweeping image of a fiery UFO. Later the opening notes from “More Than a Feeling”—played, deliciously, on some sort of horn—may summon the god himself.

Gods—especially Pan—seek worshippers; most gods want more than one. Like most novels, this one develops a plot, and like most plots this one brings people together. But as characters and subplots accrue Nick gets less interesting: he tries, and mostly fails, to understand Ian and Ian’s friends, whom he nevertheless obeys. Sarah, meanwhile, becomes Nick’s de facto girlfriend (though Nick and Sarah never use that term). Yes, they have sex. She initiates. He loves it. Yes, a teen love triangle follows. Of course it does. As for the other characters, Ty, Nick’s less introspective friend, plays the role of the normie, the control for Nick and Sarah’s experiment. Nick’s divorced, distracted dad, the custodial parent, rarely communicates with his Russian immigrant mom, who’s busy cleaning houses and constructing her own small American dream. Ty’s mom and dad are still together, but he hits her: that’s one reason she keeps, in her car, books about feminism.

These adults do what they must to fill in a teen character’s background. Other teens, especially Sarah, could be doing more. If the first half of the novel is, delightfully, Janet Frame meets Nietzsche meets “More Than a Feeling,” the second half of the novel is more The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets I Know What You Did Last Summer. That’s a problem, not because Pan resembles modern teen horror and modern teen romance, but because Pan does not resemble them enough. Clune isn’t writing for teens, but he’s writing about them: his novel about Pan’s wildness happens to follow William Empson’s rubric for the pastoral, a work about a supposedly simpler class of people, “but not by or for them.” Pan is pastoral’s patron. But he’s not a god you can trust.

By the end of Pan I had the same feeling I get when I read most attempts at science fiction by authors who come from prestige literary traditions. Just as Proust-loving authors could learn from Kim Stanley Robinson, an imaginary, ideal novelist for Nick’s story could learn not just from Proust but from Robin Talley and Judy Blume. That novelist would let Nick find out what happened, offstage, to Ian, his brother, and Sarah. (There’s a fire that burns down a barn. Or is there?)

That novelist might recognize the flatness of Clune’s supporting characters, particularly Sarah, who begins as a crush and collaborator, only to become the impetus for Nick’s sexual jealousy. She does talk to Steph, Ian’s semi-accomplice, so Pan passes the Bechdel test, but not by much. In her most vivid moments Sarah looks, not to Nick, but to the even younger, even more stigmatized would-be cultist Carl, like the beginning of some found family. She even says so, though Nick—distracted by the impossibility of death in the mind of the living, and by an Emily Dickinson reference—won’t listen.

Sarah went and sat down on the couch next to Carl, so that he was between us.

“Carl,” she said, “you could, like, be our kid. Mine and Nick’s. We could be your high school parents.”

She giggled. Carl started to talk again, but now the fly was so loud I was having trouble hearing. I watched them—Carl talking and Sarah smiling—and I wondered why neither of them mentioned the fly. I wondered how they could hear each other.

“Shut up,” I said.

Clune has written a novel about feeling trapped, at fifteen and sixteen, in your own solitary consciousness. Randall Jarrell writes that “a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” And yet more overhearing and less interrupting, more Sarah and Carl with fewer flies, might have made this novel even more thoughtful.

Nick “outgrows” (those are scare quotes) Boston, and Walter Scott’s endless, heroic Ivanhoe, for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, Bach’s orchestral suites, Sarah’s own poetry, and Baudelaire. Larry, a meathead who misunderstands everything, announces that his favorite book “BEATS THE SHIT OUT OF IVANHOE”: Michael Shea’s 1983 World Fantasy Award winner Nifft the Lean (which I have not read; it looks like fun, overwritten pulp). I hope—I think—Clune means to recommend it, though Nick calls Nifft a “cheap, ridiculous book.” (What if Clune wrote a sword-and-sorcery novel?)

By the end, after the cult’s barn burns down (or something), Nick discovers a more accessible explanation for his ordeals. “Ian could make a church out of his mental illness if he wanted to. I knew the truth. It was the Divorce. Just the Divorce.” He’s a child of divorce who needs his mom, while Sarah—of course—is a kid whose dad buys her a car. Clune no more expects us to accept Nick’s sociological explanation—his social model—than he expects us to believe without question in Ian’s visions and Ian’s existential model. The novelist stands outside his main character, at the beginning and at the end, and knows more. That character, and that novelist, have learned a lot about mental illness, and faith, and trust, and disability, and social class. But it’s not clear if either one got to know—as the realist novel encourages; as YA nearly requires—the independence, and the interiority, and the moral compass, that belong to other people. Clune never shows his characters how to do that. He does, though, give a long look at the parallels and the inseparability of Pan from panic, epiphany from apophenia, our brightly intangible inner worlds from the asphalt and cinderblocks, the mice and weeds, that we have to share. For that alone, Pan deserves to feel seen.