In 2013, Hazelden Publishing, the book-production arm of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the famous Minnesota-based treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction, released a book called White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, by an English professor named Michael Clune. To say that it seemed like a departure from the collections of daily meditations and 12-step affirmations that compose much of the Hazelden list—staples full of what David Foster Wallace called the “polyesterishly banal” language of recovery—would be putting it mildly. White Out is like something from the high-modernist era of Joyce and Woolf—dark, fragmented, impressionistic, saturated with irony and black humor. “The best book about drugs since Les Paradis Artificels” by Charles Baudelaire, the novelist Ben Lerner wrote in The New Yorker. After Hazelden let it go out of print, McNally Editions—“devoted to elevating unduly neglected books and authors”—brought out a 10th-anniversary edition in 2023.
The contours of White Out are basically familiar: A 20-something man trying to write a Ph.D. dissertation becomes possessed by a fierce heroin addiction. His recovery narrative is conventional enough—he keeps failing and failing and failing again to get clean, before finally getting forced into sobriety by the threat of prison time and by family pressure. White Out possesses the quest element that propels many a recovery memoir—except that in Clune’s case, the quest for sobriety is until the end consistently subordinated to the quest to score more drugs. For three-quarters of its pages, the book reads like a paean to dope, a lyrical testament to the transcendent bliss of the first time using, and to the futile effort to recapture it. Until the end, Clune’s sympathy is with the dope, or with the addiction. And yet I can see how someone at Hazelden thought it made sense to acquire this book: As addicts know, sometimes the best delivery mechanism for a message about how to get sober is honest testimony from a recovered addict—and White Out provides an excruciatingly vivid account of the subjective experience of addiction.
With his new book, Pan, Clune has turned his cockeyed sensibility and coruscating intellect to fiction. (Or, perhaps, “fiction”: A section of Pan, with only a few alterations, was previously published in Harper’s and slugged as “memoir.”) This time, he’s portraying an adolescent at the mercy of panic attacks. In light of what we know from White Out, seeing this narrative as an origin story of addiction is not unreasonable: The road from anxiety disorder to drug dependence is well trod. (I have trod it myself; it sucks.) In fact, it is tempting to assess Pan from a clinical-scientific perspective, reviewing it as a psychiatric case study—the literary critic, the DSM-5 in hand, doing grand rounds on the mental-health ward, assessing the accuracy of Clune’s rendering of panic attacks. But to do so would be like analyzing Moby-Dick as a field guide to cetaceans—instructive in its way but kind of missing the point.
Once again, Clune doesn’t follow the standard quest plot, a tidy arc from diagnosis to cure. Still, in capturing the symptoms, he is spot-on. Through the first-person narration of his protagonist, Nicholas, a teenager suddenly besieged by anxiety, Clune conveys with uncanny vividness what a panic attack feels like. Nicholas is especially attuned to how the distortion of visual perception can trigger a cascade of runaway mental and physical responses. “I was sitting in geometry class under the fluorescents when it happened,” he says of his first attack, at age 15:
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.
Nicholas’s narration captures the subjective experience of panic with high-res precision. “That’s what your thoughts are waiting for,” Nicholas says, describing how during a panic attack first your own thoughts and then your own body (and sometimes first your body and then your thoughts) betray you. Your thoughts “flood your head with news of the catastrophe unfolding in your body.
For some—for me—the experience of certain kinds of anxiety has a disconcerting synesthetic quality. Rays of sunlight come through my eyes and get in my chest, and I feel like I’m gagging on them. For Nicholas, too, senses and even physical properties intersect with and become one another. Light takes on a solid, tactile quality (“black coils of sunlight heaped”) and artistic forms become fully permeable (Bach is like “architecture inside a color”). And here he is after a panic attack: “I thought until there were no spaces between the thoughts, until each thought resembled the one before. I thought until my thoughts turned the color of darkness behind my eyelids, until they sounded like breathing.”
Nicholas’s third panic attack lands him in the emergency room, convinced he is having a heart attack. If we’re reading this as a clinical case study, that’s a typical presentation: Panic attacks send lots of people to the ER believing they’re having a heart attack. What makes Nicholas identifiably Clunian is that he doesn’t rush to the ER. He tries—successfully for a time—to ward off the attack by reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which becomes a magic prophylactic against death; only at 4:35 a.m., when he gets to the end of the book, does he tell his dad what’s happening, and they go to the hospital.
Pan isn’t a paean to panic attacks, exactly, but it is about a quest to find through them, fearsome as they are, some kind of higher meaning or transcendent level of existence. “A panic attack doesn’t feel like a panic attack,” he declares at one point. “It feels like insight.”
Not that he would be able to escape panic even if he wanted to; the doctors he sees are hapless. The ER doctor who first diagnoses a panic attack prescribes … a paper bag for him to breathe into. No longer commonly recommended as a panic remedy, it used to be (I carried paper bags around with me as a kid, to no avail). The scientific rationale, such as it is: Breathing in your own exhaled carbon dioxide from the bag is supposed to fix a CO2 deficit caused by hyperventilation that exacerbates symptoms such as dizziness and tingling in the extremities. Clune deploys the bag for comedic purposes, most notably in Nicholas’s encounter with one of his Catholic-school nuns, who is convinced he is using it for nefarious purposes, with Nicholas protesting that “they’re medical bags.” The materialist, physiological explanation for the phenomenon of panic generates a bright contrast with the philosophical and metaphysical inquiries that have Nicholas, and Clune, in their grip.
Pan is a coming-of-age novel set in the Chicago suburbs of the early 1990s. The depressing townhouse development, Chariot Courts, where he is living with his divorced dad, is “a battleground between the idea of home and the armies of impermanence.” His mom’s house, which he ultimately returns to, is somehow even worse, “far more exposed to impermanence,” Nicholas says. “It was a satire on the very idea of home.” A kind of everyplace that’s no place, his world is kept afloat only by a raft of pop-cultural references and brands that dominated the 1980s and ’90s, imbued with the deep meaning that a teenager of the time would have accorded them: the restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday; Ministry; Guns N’ Roses; Who’s the Boss?; Roseanne; the Chicago Bulls of the Michael Jordan era; the Plymouth Horizon; 7-Eleven Slurpees. “More Than a Feeling,” the 1970s rock anthem by Boston, in particular takes on for Nicholas a talismanic, mystical—and, for the reader, rather droll—significance.
Nicholas provides a fine-grain anthropological analysis of status competition in high school, where “you have to be aware of your popularity,” he says. “It’s like your credit rating in adulthood.” But his anxiety makes achieving coolness a challenge—panic is the “opposite of cool.” Cool is “minimal consciousness” and “panic, on the other hand, is excess of consciousness. Your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone.” Again, spot-on.
Nicholas does ordinary stuff, like work at Ace Hardware and become romantically involved with a classmate, Sarah. Yet she becomes almost as preoccupied as he is with figuring out the origins of his panic, and Clune scripts for him a young autodidact’s intellectual adventure. Nicholas heads to the public library, and is led (via a detour through books on financial panics) to the works of Oscar Wilde, whose preoccupation with ancient Greece prompts Sarah to suggest maybe panic has something to do with Pan, the mischievous Greek god with goat legs who, when awakened from sleep, would scream terrifyingly at passersby. Maybe, Nicholas comes to think, what bedevils him is not a medical condition—the sort of thing a physician can properly diagnose—but the devilry of Pan.
His anxiety acquires the dimensions of something existential or spiritual, even theological: He establishes (in his head) the First Church of Pan, with a series of liturgies and behaviors meant to ward off his anxiety by keeping him exquisitely attuned to Pan’s possible presence. Soon he, Sarah, and his friend Ty fall in with a weird but cooler-than-them crowd who spend their afternoons in an abandoned barn. There they listen to music and do drugs—though not Nicholas, who worries that drugs will worsen his panic, which is the only consciousness-warper he needs. They also engage in strange rituals (including bludgeoning mice to death with shovels) devised by one kid’s older brother, college-age Ian, and have the sorts of conversations that kids doing drugs have.
The overall effect is like Judy Blume filtered through David Lynch or William S. Burroughs: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Nicholas, Having a Panic Attack While My Friends Trip on Acid. This is a bracing gestalt.
For a reader, the psychedelic swirl of drugs, music, spiritual musings, and disturbing rites can feel like being sober around a bunch of people who are very stoned: The deep wisdom being dispensed seems more like faux profundity, and you feel excluded, confused, and annoyed. But then come the passages of cockeyed brilliance—such as this one, yoking Nicholas’s philosophical meditation on the nature of subjective perception to the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island.
No one knows how color really looks to anyone else. It’s the definition of a private experience. All we share are the names.
The sole exception to the rule of the total privacy of color experience can be found in the television of the Gilligan’s Island era. Due to an accidental feature of this primitive technology, the color of television made in the middle nineteen sixties is essentially public, rather than private. The sky in Gilligan’s Island isn’t the color of the sky outside, and it’s not the color of the sky in eighties television. No, we know everyone sees Gilligan’s Island–era color identically from the inside. We can tell this isn’t our own private feeling from the way it feels. It doesn’t feel like my feeling. It feels like everyone’s.
The engineers who designed the color, Nicholas explains, “inadvertently created the first and last collective color sensation in the history of human civilization. Watching Gilligan’s Island is the closest I’ve ever gotten to seeing the world as someone else does.”
This sounds like something out of the mouth of a Quentin Tarantino character on a brilliant, oddball tangent. Is it technologically, scientifically, philosophically true? Actually, yes, sort of. Beginning in the 1950s, the National Television System Committee required that television sets be calibrated to constrain the range of color to ensure that viewers had a uniform experience of it. Of course, there’s no way to measure whether the “qualia” of inner color experience is shared among individuals. But it feels true to Nicholas, and this high-low riff delivers an ineffable intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction.
When Nicholas discovers Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Clune’s coming-of-age novel edges toward a Künstlerroman, because from Baudelaire he gets the idea of trying to transform darkness—to transform panic—into beauty, or even comfort, through writing. By putting on the page “the boredom and horror and emptiness of the world,” he thinks, maybe he can even create “a home for the familyless” and “a level of the world invulnerable to panic.”
Trying to write well enough about panic anxiety to transcend it and convey what Ian calls its “absolute clarity” is surely in part what Clune is up to in Pan. For Nicholas, anyway, this works—sort of, at least for a time. He starts sleeping better.
But capturing through language what panic is like—translating for other people what happens “deep inside, in the weird physics of consciousness” amidst an attack—is impossible. The panic resurges, and he realizes he needs a better elixir, “something stronger” than his own writing. No, not drugs—for the young Michael Clune, those would evidently come soon enough—but art. Sarah directs him to the art of the Renaissance. Looking at the paintings of Bellini, Nicholas finally “fell out” of his own head, and his body merges with time (more synesthesia) and with the world of inanimate things around him.
When Nicholas gets sent back from his father’s house to live with his mother for his senior year, he begins groping his way toward a more mundane psychological explanation for his panic attacks: his parents’ divorce. But the Divorce theory, as he comes to call it, feels too banal a source of his affliction. “Maybe it’s better to pretend it could be Pan instead of Divorce, magic instead of mental illness,” Nicholas thinks. “Mental illness,” Ty tells him, supportively, “it’s retarded.”
Pan’s final pages are a kaleidoscope of phantasmagoria and philosophic bewilderment, a refusal of closure and clarity that is seemingly—and fittingly—designed to give readers a heavy dose of, to use the clinical term, derealization. This conclusion is evidently true to Clune’s youthful self, too: After all, ahead of him lies hell. Perhaps psychologists and philosophers should prescribe this dazzling and disorienting novel as exposure therapy for both the sick and the well. Because ultimately nothing—not writing, not art, not drugs, not brown paper bags, not cognitive behavioral therapy (though all of those might help)—can create a “level of the world invulnerable to panic.” Nothing can create the home of absolute safety and belonging, or promise the freedom from anxiety and the transcendence of death we crave.
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