The Seasons Start Inside You

by Max Callimanopulos

Pan Michael Clune, Penguin Press, July 2025

All spring his confession dogged me. The review copy arrived in March; it sat on my bedside table unread. PAN it said, in big yellow letters, against an ugly, confused backdrop that reminded me, when I happened to glance at it, of a painting one might find in a dentist’s office. But it was his confession that bothered me, written in the same yellow as the title, neatly occupying the bottom couple inches of cover space: “I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.” It came courtesy of Ben Lerner, a peer of Clune’s, a poet-novelist himself, and – apparently – a thief. 

In the months before I finally cracked open Pan, Ben Lerner’s surprising bit of front-cover blurbage appeared to me in dreams and on in the subway; I puzzled over it at dinners; I found myself repeating it under my breath like a dumb mantra. Why would Lerner say that? All writers crib, we know that, but surely he wasn’t being literal. Lerner is a medium-sized star in the small galaxy of American letters. I liked his novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 (not so much The Topeka School) and remembered them containing plenty of interesting language and ideas. So why would he need to steal Michael Clune’s language and ideas? What was so intoxicating about them? Would I feel compelled to do the same, after I read Pan?

Not quite. But I understand Lerner’s kleptomaniac impulse. Before coming to fiction, Michael Clune wrote a book called White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, a memoir of his addiction that managed to be both fresh and exceedingly beautiful. When Clune tries dope for the first time, on a rooftop in Manhattan with the girl he’s in love with, the moment is described rapturously: “A single cloud moved through the blue sky. I was on my back looking up. My eye was a glass box, and inside it there was no time….Eva’s short body lay perpendicular to my long body. From the sky, we looked like a clock stopped at three-thirty.” White Out was loaded with passages like this, written in Clune’s dreamy, muscular style – passages that I admired and did, once or twice, feel tempted to pilfer. 

So I started Pan with a feeling of pleasant expectation, wondering if Michael Clune’s gifts as a writer – his short, precise descriptions, his weird feel for the strange and clarifying metaphor, his interest in pop music (in White Out, he memorably likens heroin addiction to the experience of listening to the Gnarls Barkley song “Crazy”) – would find their way into his fiction. Certain writers, like Joan Didion, never quite make the leap; the writing feels like reporting, their novels like long pieces of literary journalism. Clune, happily, is not one of them. Pan, his first novel, is as funny and unconventional as his memoir was; it’s a book one might do well to steal language and ideas from.  

At its center is Nick, a fifteen-year old. He lives in a bleak midwestern suburb, a place where “everything's constantly flying away into the hole of the future,” with his mostly-absent father. He has a best friend named Ty and together, the two of them occupy a position of “solid and unexceptional popularity” at their high school. His life is normal and vaguely sad. 

But fifteen is the age “when the human being bursts into the fullness of life,” and one day, sitting in geometry class, Nick has the following revelation: “My hand, I realize slowly, it’s a…thing.” From then on, his problems only worsen. The word diabetes, spoken by Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III, causes him to forget “how to move blood through my body.” Reading Ivanhoe one night, he becomes aware that he is on the verge of a heart attack. To stave it off, he reads all night until he finishes the book: “Then I walked downstairs and told Dad that I was having a heart attack.” At the hospital, Nick is told he’s having a panic attack. “‘What am I panicking about?’” He asks. No answer. So much for western medicine. It will be up to Nick, equipped with a virtually Neolithic understanding of what mental health is, to diagnose and treat his neuroses. 

White Out was driven by Michael Clune’s preoccupation with the way heroin inscribed itself on his consciousness, how the “memory disease,” as he termed it, made it so his every thought and feeling ran in the direction of the drug. In Pan, Clune turns his focus to the shape of thought itself. Here, the altered state isn’t chemical but psychological: panic, a wild rush that violently upends Nick’s inner life and recasts the familiar as alien. Again and again, he returns to certain motifs – water, eyes, gates, diving boards – to try and explain how panic feels. “I felt,” Nick reports at the onset of one attack, “like my vision was standing with its feet in my face. Like my face is a diving board.” Later, we’re told that “The symptoms of panic are like a gate in my mind.” When a wayward thought crosses Nick’s mind, he suggests, rather obscurely: “It had that quality, the quality of water that isn’t water.” During a particularly acute attack, Nick feels “as if Pan visible might extend from my eyes–His horns out of my eyes.” 

Pan! The priapic god of theatrical criticism makes his first appearance halfway through the book, swinging us into darker, witchier territory. Nick and Ty fall in with an edgy crowd led by Ian, a college dropout and sometimes-shaman who may himself be possessed by the spirit of Pan. They hang out in an old barn and smoke pot. They dance naked. They throw a bacchanal called “Belt Day.” They engage in the ritualistic killing of mice. Predictably, things spiral. The group splinters; Ian is packed off to a “Buddhist monastery” in Massachusetts. 

Before he disappears, Ian, who sees in Nick a kindred spirit, offers the younger boy some advice. “When you are aware of the panic,” he says, “you are seeing the truth of ordinary life.” What might that truth be? Ordinary life, Ian avers, is tawdry and superficial, populated by “hollows,” people untouched by Pan, lacking any interiority. Panic, on the other hand, is not something to be cured or treated, but something to heed, to approach reverently, a form of insight. “Panic is absolute clarity,” Ian tells Nick.  

That madness might accompany genius is a digestible bit of pop psychology that Clune approaches hesitantly. He’s as skeptical of Ian’s wild-eyed wisdom as he is of the psychiatric establishment’s clinical assessment of Nick’s mental health. What really seems to bother Clune is the sheer impossibility of describing the 200-mile-per-hour pace of panic in prose, something which, despite his unusual bank of images and metaphorical language, he essentially fails to do. This doesn’t mean that Pan fails as a novel. Writers have bent themselves to the challenge of pinning thought to the page since William James described consciousness as a “stream” in 1890; Clune is simply the latest to try his hand. He is, to his credit, self-aware about the difficulty of this sort of writing.  “What happened inside,” he eventually admits, “deep inside, in the weird physics of consciousness–you couldn't translate into language by yourself.” 

This, of course, might be the point. Language can only approximate experience and is woefully ill-suited to outlining the contours of one’s consciousness. But Michael Clune’s language, as Lerner hinted, is undeniably lovely and his ideas worth lingering over. Few writers alive today would describe a song, playing quietly, as being “like a glass man, striding alongside the car, bones tinkling”, or remember that “When you're fifteen, your body and mind are still tied to nature. The seasons start inside you….You discover the season, now you're performing it. You're winter, you're spring. And the things around start to mimic you.” Yet Pan’s best ideas might be its simplest. Near the end of the novel, having established some uneasy control over his mindstate, Nick comes to a modest realization: “Thought is just thought.” I think I agree. 

MAX CALLIMANOPULOS has a long last name. He lives very happily in Brooklyn, New York.

Art by Esther Goddard