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.
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.
