A steady oscillation between deliciously observed, ferociously strange fragments of consciousness and the social kabuki of the tragicomic teenage bildungsroman ... Invigorating and often hilarious ... When we’re really in Nicholas’s mind, we never want to leave ... Thrilling ... Don’t expect much in the way of big narrative twists ... The juice here is watching Clune’s little cyclones of thought ... [Clune] is writing in the tradition of Proust, Sebald, Jenny Offill, Teju Cole and Nicholson Baker, writers whose eccentricities manifest in singular voices that are propulsive enough without pyrotechnic narratives. Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs.
Clune doesn’t choose between what we might describe as the poetic and the novelistic, the mystic and the naturalistic ... When it comes to time and consciousness, Clune’s perennial topics, visionary perception is perhaps just a deeper form of realism.
[A] strange, idiosyncratic beauty ... A testament to the novel’s powers of enchantment; it seduces you into thinking like a child again ... Clune has achieved a remarkable sleight of genre, threading realism’s dull needle with a semi-magical thread.
This novel ought to be a breakout for Mr. Clune, who captures Nick’s strobing visions with remarkable lucidity and excellent dry humor ... Devotes a bit too much space to the druggie philosophizing of Nick’s friends, which seems hollow compared to Nick’s strange and revelatory interpretations ... A reawakening.
Saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit, the sort of holy mania one finds in writers like William Blake or Christopher Smart. The effect, to the extent one can refer to it as merely an 'effect,' is dazzling ... At once startlingly funny and radiantly...strange ... Whatever Pan might lack in terms of old-fashioned narrative mechanics, it more than makes up for in humor, particularity and what I am forced to refer to simply as meaning ... Insight, indeed, is what Pan offers in spades, and part of what makes it so delicious is the way it mulches up both the familiar materials of millennial adolescence...into something that feels at once semi-typically earthy and decidedly cosmic ... Approachable and inviting but also wild enough to seem practically avant-garde ... Exhilarating, a pure joy.
A dense, boundary-pushing and increasingly psychedelic book that draws you into its peculiar world ...
A surreal, if slightly unwieldy, portrayal of teenagerhood, this mind-bending book is anchored by Clune’s effortless, masterful humour: the result is not only an impressive debut, but a gargantuan feat in coming-of-age literature.
Remarkable for the honesty of its treatment of both mental illness and adolescence. It shows more successfully than any other book I’ve read how these can be experienced as black magic ... Clune is brilliant on the loss of control and exaggeration of terror that follows ... The other characters never fully become people. They’re external experiences that inform the way Nicholas relates to his own mind ... A reader who approaches Pan expecting the usual rewards of a coming-of-age story will be sorely disappointed. It offers not answers but visions ... When we close the book, we find ourselves in a larger world.
The...challenge with this kind of novel...is that sustained immersion in the headspace of a self-absorbed teen can be exhausting. For the most part, humor keeps the tedium at bay. The image of Nick drying his 'medical' paper bags in the boys’ bathroom is very funny, as is his fumbling his first date with Sarah. There’s dramatic irony at work here; the reader sees the absurdity of these situations, even if they’re deadly serious to Nick ... If at times I wanted to claw my way out of Nick’s psyche, that’s a testament to how deeply Clune mines it.
For Nick, the end result of his panic attacks is creativity, insight, and art. Does it lessen his brilliance if it’s rooted in divorce and poor healthcare, tied not to any miraculous recovery but to a lifetime of frayed edges? Clune, coyly, doesn’t say. Maybe he thinks the difference doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s panicking. Maybe both.
What sets [Pan] apart is Clune’s luminous prose, deadpan humour and ability to make his narrator’s panic attacks, drug-taking and philosophising...so enthralling that his story is a revelation and never a retread ... Strange and original ... Life-affirming fiction.
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 ... Interiorized, teen-appropriate language...stand out ... Delightful ... As characters and subplots accrue Nick gets less interesting ... Anybody who has witnessed the confused epiphanies of mental illness will recognize this deadlock ... More overhearing and less interrupting, more Sarah and Carl with fewer flies, might have made this novel even more thoughtfu.
A novel that runs more on vibes than plot or character ... The novel is heavy with impending violence, but despite the foreboding there is no climactic event ... The book feels inescapably adolescent ... Some readers may be hypnotised by Clune’s slippery, sensual prose. I found it muggy and oppressive—like being stuck with a bunch of stoners who refuse to open the windows.
A peculiar coming-of-age comedy that covers the genre’s regular beat...while also doubling as a philosophical horror story about nothing less than the problem of being alive ... In this stylish and unsettling novel, the greatest fear is that inside your head is the only place to be.
Sagacious ... Clune’s narrative has a powerful beginning and Nicks’ voice has a vitality filled with wit, humor, and all around teenage-ness that is fairly intoxicating ... What Clune leaves readers with is the suggestion of a possible underlying connection between mental illness and an elevation of intuition and insight.
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.
