Do Panic

Gideon Leek evaluates Michael Clune’s debut novel, “Pan.”

By Gideon LeekJuly 24, 2025

• Fiction

WHEN I WAS 20 years old at liberal arts college, I became hyperaware of my racing heartbeat at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Unfortunately, I happened to be watching Béla Tarr’s seven-hour film Sátántangó (1994). The next day, when I went to have my “heart attack” checked at urgent care, I was informed that there was no such thing. My heart was healthy. I was fine. It was just a panic attack. I went to therapy, did deep breathing; the panic attacks stopped. Back then, I spent a great deal of time poring over WebMD articles, as a panicked person does, but I never looked into panic attacks. They seemed obvious, simple, uninteresting—I was too proud a hypochondriac to freak out over nothing. Michael Clune, an acclaimed memoirist and academic who also went to liberal arts college outside Cleveland, appears to have felt the opposite. Pan, his debut novel, is an in-depth study of panic itself: What causes it? Why does it happen? Is it really wrong?

“The word panic is derived from the god Pan, and originally referred to the sudden fear aroused by the presence of a god,” writes Clune. It’s the 1990s and 15-year-old Nick is living in suburban Illinois with his divorced father; he’s not in the presence of anything holier than strip malls and schoolwork. He panics anyway—freaking out in geometry class, losing it when Al Pacino gets diabetes in The Godfather Part III, and powering through an imagined heart attack while reading Ivanhoe in bed. It’s debilitating and embarrassing, but it’s also not solely negative. The wild imagination unleashed by panic is creative and rich. Clune argues that the spiritual, imaginary, and creative aspects of panic are worthy of respect and investigation, rather than just symptoms to be cured. Over the 300-plus pages of Pan, we see Nick bravely, curiously, and without professional help work to understand his condition. Should he cure it? Should he channel it? Should he just try to cope?

Nick’s panic attacks, which occur for the first third of the novel, are like anyone else’s—dissociation, rapid thoughts, chest tightness, racing pulse, shortness of breath. At first, he tries to power through the attacks with sheer focus—“I suspended the heart attack in Ivanhoe. Like when you shake a bottle of oil-and-vinegar salad dressing. As long as you shake the bottle, the oil is suspended in the vinegar. When you stop shaking it, the oil comes out.” But eventually, he gives up and seeks help.

At the emergency room, a panic attack is a nonincident—“organ failure [and] stab wounds” are more urgent—and Nick is quickly sent home with a paper bag (the small kind, for a lunch) and told to breathe into it whenever he gets an attack, to stop the hyperventilating and increase the CO2 level in his blood. This is where, initially, the treatment stops. “A panic attack,” says his father. “Nothing to worry about, thank God.” It’s not that his dad doesn’t want to help. He just doesn’t know how. Nick’s people—working-class immigrants—aren’t the kind of people who get proper treatment for anything, mental health especially. There is a sweet, sad moment when, after the initial hospital visit, Nick’s dad tries to help. “Better take one more bag,” he says. “In case one of them gets wet.”

Panic attacks, strangely, have a positive impact on Nick’s social life. High schoolers typically have their thing: they do sports or debate or theater. Nick, who doesn’t have any hobbies or talents, somewhat reluctantly gets a varsity letter in panic. He joins up with a crew of certified freaks, druggy losers who see him as a sort of mascot. These are kids with money and without supervision, ideal friends for a high schooler. Nick and his down-to-earth buddy Ty (who is Black and another sort of mascot) start hanging out at their clubhouse—a spot called “the barn.” It’s a new world for them, and Nick, whose mother cleans houses, is keenly aware of the class conflict. These are rich kids, the kind with “knickknacks”: “The bronze candle holders. This marble column. The oriental rug.” What Nick doesn’t realize is that he and Ty are knickknacks too.

The rich kids are led by a demented older boy named Ian, who was kicked out of Penn for psychologically torturing his girlfriend. Now, without a girlfriend to pick on, he likes to kill mice with a shovel. Ian, like Nick, is mentally ill, but he takes the glamorous view: “Panic and life are not two things. They are one thing. When you are aware of the panic, you are seeing the truth of ordinary life. The darkness of ordinary life makes the brightness of panic visible.” He explains the temporal symbolism of Nick’s attacks: “[P]anic most often erupts at age fifteen. This is when the human being bursts into the fullness of life. Origen says the number five in the sacred texts refers to the five senses. He says the number three refers to the Mysteries. Fifteen. Five by three. The senses bound by the Mysteries.” He warns against false prophets:

The goal of the therapists is to turn you away from the thoughts of panic, away from the truth of panic, back to ordinary life. But this is impossible […] Because panic is not an interruption of ordinary life, the way asthma or diabetes is an interruption of ordinary life. When ordinary life is at its fullest, when it is most truly itself—just then, does panic arise.

For panic, in Ian’s interpretation, is “absolute clarity,” vital insight into deeper truth. As Ye (formerly Kanye West) once said about his bipolar disorder, “Ain’t no disability. I’m a superhero!”

Nick’s not quite a superhero, but he does think differently. His responses are provocative, unexpected. He interrupts a conversation to clarify how “stuff” is meaningfully more negative than “something”: “Stuff is a word that doesn’t typically refer to anything very cool […] Short stuff. Gay stuff. Kid stuff. Fun stuff.” In bed, his (maybe) girlfriend says, “I want you inside me.” Nick responds: “Inside how?” Eventually, his off-kilter reactions become more intellectual. Take, for example, this long, didactic theory of color:

Turn on a modern TV show and freeze the screen on a shot showing the sky. Now walk around the room and view it from different angles. Get a water glass and reflect a little of the color on the glass. Turn the lights on and off. You’ll notice that the color changes in tone very slightly, just like real color.

Now perform the same experiment with the sky in Gilligan’s Island. What you’ll discover is that, whether the lights are on or off, whether the color is reflected on a water glass, stared at directly on the screen, or peeked at from a prone position underneath a translucent coffee table—the color remains exactly the same.

That’s a fascinating idea. Is it any less insightful because you can imagine the spiraling paranoia that led to it?

When Nick finally does see a psychiatrist, after panic attacks have been replaced by constant intrusive thoughts, he gets the medical view. “First you had panic attacks,” says the doctor. “And now the panic attacks have subsided, but you experience thoughts—persistent worries or fears, dwelling on subjects in ways that appear excessive.” He explains: “Your condition […] is known as Generalized Anxiety Disorder. […] The panic is slightly diluted, as it were, and poured into thoughts, which efficiently transmit the panic across the entire twenty-four-hour spectrum.” There is no proven medicine for Nick. He gets the second-best thing—cognitive behavioral therapy. Breathe deep. Be calm. Nick tries. Nick fails.

Still anxious, Nick leans into Ian’s glamorous view: channeling his panic into prophecy. At the barn, he becomes a sage—preaching wizard-like to his buddies, taking his symptoms as sacred rites. Here he is on insomnia: “Anyone who says they don’t want to die,” says Nick, “and yet allows themselves to fall asleep each night is worse than a fool. They are traitors to consciousness.” Ian agrees, reassuring Nick: “The doctors couldn’t help you […] because your fear of falling asleep is rational.” Is it?

Ty, Nick’s old friend, his rational friend, calls BS: “Do you […] really believe all that shit you were talking about sleep?” “I don’t,” admits Nick. “My generalized anxiety does.” This phenomenon is what we call splitting—the idea that there is a distinct “real” you existing untouched by mental illness. It is as delusional as the delusions themselves. Ty has insight into the split. He has experienced it with his abusive father: “On one level my dad loves my mom. On the other level he’s trying to kill her. And he wants to keep both levels going, like two snakes, over and under.”

Assuming, as Nick (and I think Michael Clune) does, that mental health treatment is ineffective, there are three options for the afflicted: you can deny the crazy to protect it—like Ty’s dad; you can put the crazy on a crazy pedestal—like Ian; or you can open yourself to the condition, remove the shame, and work together with the crazy. As Nietzsche once said, “I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog.’”

Pan ends with Nick’s first semisuccessful attempt at self-healing. He ditches the barn and starts keeping a journal, carefully, privately working with the crazy: “Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of this world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer.” He meditates, no longer trying to bury his intrusive thoughts—as he did during his marathon reading of Ivanhoe—but instead facing them manfully. It works: “Meditation captured the panic thoughts; writing them down neutralized them.” Nick starts to sleep again, and he finally realizes what the reader has known all along.

Why did diabetes really upset Nick in The Godfather Part III? Was it because “it was a word of dark magic, of poisoned time”? Or because it sounded a lot like divorce? Was it a Greek god that caused the panic? Or was it something simple, obvious, repressed? “Ian could make a church out [of] his mental illness if he wanted to,” says Nick. “I knew the truth. It was the Divorce. Just the Divorce.”

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. Let’s just hope he’s not stuck watching Sátántangó.