Pan - Hardcover

Clune, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593834429 ISBN 13: 9780593834428

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction's 2025 First Novel Prize

“Pan is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit . . . For those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer . . . Pan is exhilarating, a pure joy—and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror—from end to end.” —Matthew Spektor, The Washington Post

“Deliciously observed, ferociously strange . . . Reading his experience of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs.” —Kaveh Akbar, The New York Times Book Review

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently a professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University and lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

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1.

Before the Castle of Chaluz, Near Limoges

My mom kicked me out. My behavior was getting out of control. Plus, she said, a teenage boy needed his father. So I went to live with Dad. He had a little town house. There was no town anywhere. I guess it's a polite term for "little house." The kind of house that would be respectable in the city, where land is expensive, but dropped out in the distant suburb of Libertyville, where land is cheap. Very cheap construction.

We lived in a small subdivision of town houses surrounded by empty land waiting to be developed. No sidewalks. No one knew anyone. No one's face held any kind of future for any neighbor, and so you couldn't even remember what the people who lived right next to you looked like. Always surrounded by unfamiliar faces. Just like in the city. But here there were only maybe twenty of us. In this subdivision. Maybe less. The subdivision was called Chariot Courts. We lived at 12A.

In the winter it was almost completely exposed. The raw death of the endless future, which at night in the Midwest in winter is sometimes bare inches above the roofs. Cheap housing's always more or less exposed. There was a housing project in Chicago where they found a four-year-old girl dead of old age. That was the coroner's conclusion, after examining her organs. It happened in the nineties. The coroner's report was supposed to be secret, but Larry's stepdad was a cop and he saw it. He had pictures of Dahmer's apartment too, pictures the newspapers never got. They shut that housing project down, farmed the residents out into town houses.

Chariot Courts wasn't the worst in terms of low-grade housing-far from it. The builders had wrought a few charms against total exposure to time. The name, first of all. And there was a cast-iron gate. If you could call it that. It was an odd gate, perched on an island in the center of the subdivision's entrance. On the right you had the drive going in, and on the left you had the drive going out. In the center was this little grassy island and in the middle was the gate, supported between two brick pillars. The pillars were maybe four feet high. The gate was maybe three feet wide. Real wrought iron. The bars bent into fantasies and curlicues of iron, and in the center the swirls thickened into letters:

chariot courts

The gate had a handle, but it never opened. I mean, you could walk around to the other side easy enough. But you couldn't go through the gate. Me and Ty tried to open it one time when we were drunk.

"This fucking thing," he panted, pulling on the handle.

"It's closed," I said stupidly.

He stopped pulling, stumbled back. Looked at it.

"It's like they knew they couldn't really close this place."

I knew what he was thinking. Half the time we knew what the other was thinking.

"There's no way to really close a place like this," I said.

"It's so cheap," Ty said. "Squirrels could probably afford it."

"Wind could afford it," I said. "Trash."

"Remember that Styrofoam cup we found in your living room?" Ty said. "And no one knew how it got there?"

"Anything can come in," I said.

"If it wants to," he said.

"But they made sure no one could go through the gate," I said.

"They closed what they could," Ty finished.

The gate was the second charm. The third charm was the mailboxes. They were made out of wrought iron like the gate. There was no place to put your name. I mean, people were moving in and out of Chariot Courts all the time. Some of the unfamiliar faces were actually new, in the sense of not being here yesterday. Most places like that, the mailboxes have a little window where you can stick a scrap of paper or an index card or something with your name on it. But these mailboxes were above that kind of thing. They came from the eternal motionless past. You had to write your featherlight name on a piece of paper and tape it next to the box. Your name written on wind. Your squirrel name. The mailbox itself wouldn't acknowledge the possibility that a resident's name could change.

I was fifteen when Mom kicked me out and I moved into Chariot Courts with Dad. Those three charms meant a lot to me. I associated them with money. When there's nothing solid behind the present moment, when there's no real past, no tradition, when everything's basically exposed to the future, everything's constantly flying away into the hole of the future, money is the next best thing. The gate and the mailboxes and the name were like pieces dropped off of real houses. In a spiritual sense they were the heaviest objects around. They helped to weigh the place down, on nights when the future hung its open mouth above us, and the years burned like paper in our dreams.

It happened in the middle of January, when I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, the flesh comes off the bones, what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night. At noon we could look at our own faces. All the basic shapes were there, in bone. Bright winter sun turns kids skinless. Skins them. But there we were in geometry class. The teacher also taught physics. He was grotesquely tall. Thin. He'd demonstrate the angles on his bones.

This was Catholic school. The blackboard was useless. A gray swamp dense with half-drowned numbers. Mr. Streeling would bend a leg in midair: ninety degrees, cleaner than a protractor. He'd stand and tilt his impossibly flat torso: forty-five degrees. He could lift his pants leg, unbundle new levels of bone like a spider: fifteen degrees, fifty-five, one hundred . . .

"So this is an acute angle"-he lifts his leg. The girls turn away. The guys stare in mute fascination. Mr. Streeling graded girls' tests on a curve.

I was sitting in geometry class under the fluorescents when it happened. The first time, technically. Though I could only tell it was the first time in retrospect, looking back from the third time. This must have been in early January. My right hand on my desk, my left hand fiddling with a pencil in the air.

Mr. Streeling's voice booms out, "Open the textbook, page ninety-six." The textbook lies next to my hand on the desk. Next to the textbook is a large blue rubber eraser. Hand, textbook, eraser. Desktop bright in the fake light.

My hand, I realize slowly, it's a . . . thing.

My hand is a thing too. Hand, textbook, eraser. Three things.

Oh.

That's when I forgot how to breathe. Ty saw it happen. He was sitting across the room. The teacher didn't allow us to sit together, no teacher did. But he saw me, and he gave me a look like what the hell. Watching me trying to remember how to breathe. It wasn't going well. I was sucking in too much air, or I wasn't breathing enough out. The rhythm was all wrong.

Darkness at the edge of vision . . .

Two seconds blotted out . . . when I came back my lungs had picked up the tune. The old in-and-out, the tune you hear all the time. If it ever stops, try to remember it. You can't. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. It never stops. But if it does, it's hard to remember how it goes. Ask dead people. Ask me. I gave Ty a shaky smile, like I'd been joking, my face probably red or maybe white or even a little blue. Ty turned slowly back to his textbook, shaking his head, like I was crazy. The idea that I was crazy and he was evil was the background joke of our friendship. It didn't bother him to see me like that. He didn't mention it.

The second time, it happened in a movie theater. My dad had taken me to see The Godfather III. It was a Tuesday night. Late January. The theater was basically deserted. Kind of depressing, this father-son outing on a school night. Kind of cool too. Like we didn't give a fuck about school...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593834429
• ISBN 13: 9780593834428
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar