Pan: A Novel - Softcover

Clune, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798217060498

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Nominated for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize • A Washington Post Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME and Slate

“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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Clune

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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 pi

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217060498
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 337
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales; sales@vanditmar.nl; ; Hondiuslaan 44; Utrecht; 3528 AB; Niederlande