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.
I am protective enough of the strange, idiosyncratic beauty of this book to worry in turn that some readers might not be up to the challenge of following his more baroque trains of thought ... 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.
Clune doesn’t choose between what we might describe as the poetic and the novelistic, the mystic and the naturalistic, explanations of Nick’s experience. When it comes to time and consciousness, Clune’s perennial topics, visionary perception is perhaps just a deeper form of realism.
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.
