Coming of Age in Panic Mode

The books of Michael Clune, or at least the ones written for a nonacademic audience, have focussed on very particular chapters of his life. “White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin” is a memoir about Clune’s addiction to the drug in his twenties; “Gamelife” is a memoir about growing up in the nineteen-eighties with early computer games and how they altered the thought processes of a generation. His new book, “Pan,” is about panic attacks, which the book’s narrator, Nick, a student at a Catholic high school, begins experiencing at fifteen, and which eventually evolve into a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. “Pan” is Clune’s first novel, although it contains enough continuity with his memoirs to be read as autobiographical fiction.

Like many readers, I first encountered Clune, a professor at Ohio State University and also the author of three books of literary criticism, through “White Out.” Set in Baltimore in the nineties and early two-thousands, when Clune was a graduate student in English literature at Johns Hopkins University, it is one of the better-written books on the subject of addiction. It isn’t laden with the gentlemanly throat-clearing of Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” is funnier than William S. Burroughs’s “Junky,” and is free of the celebrity decadence of memoirs like Nikki Sixx’s “The Heroin Diaries” and Cat Marnell’s “How to Murder Your Life.” Its descriptions of being high come closer to Don Gately’s Dilaudid reveries in “Infinite Jest” than they do the typical drug memoir.

“White Out” was published in 2013 by Hazelden Publishing, an imprint of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation that specializes in books about behavioral health, but was quickly recognized as a work of stylistic ambition. (A tenth-anniversary reprint was published by McNally Editions, the McNally Jackson bookstore imprint, in 2023). Clune observes the beginning of the opioid crisis, when prescription painkillers flooded the country and led to millions of people becoming addicted to heroin and fentanyl. But he came to heroin the old-fashioned way, snorting it with friends and staring at a cloud and then wanting more. He kicked his habit in 2002, the same year the first season of “The Wire” introduced us to the heroin-addicted character Bubbles scavenging around Baltimore.

Addiction memoirs tend to share certain tropes—squalor, mainly—and “White Out” is no exception. A friend answers the door with a syringe sticking out of his neck. “Through no fault of my own,” one chapter begins, “my apartment had become infested by maggots.” But there is dark comedy in the pratfalls of Clune and his fellow-addicts as they form relationships of convenience and set out to score while struggling to maintain the illusion for one another that everything is fine in their ransacked lives. Clune tries over and over to quit, leaving notes around his apartment that say “Don’t Do Dope.” It is only after a felony charge for heroin possession lands him in a court-ordered treatment program that he kicks his habit, and the book is written with the insight of someone in long-term recovery. (Based on this experience of getting arrested, which he has said saved his life, Clune has advocated against the decriminalization of drugs.)

In “Gamelife,” Clune’s next book, the organizing principle is the text-based adventure games that he started playing on a Commodore 64 computer when he was seven years old. Here, an obsession with gaming plays out against family life with his Irish father and American mother in Evanston, Illinois. The text commands of the games become a literary form, a way of processing thought in parallel to the messier contours of ordinary prose.

In both books, Clune’s writing occasionally transcends memoir and enters the realm of full-on fantasy, such as the dreams Clune describes having while experiencing withdrawal in “White Out.”

“That first night of kicking, I imagined I was in a castle,” he writes.

“A blizzard was raging outside. I’d been trudging through the blizzard, carrying my sword and shield, fleeing the enemy. I knocked on the massive oak door of the castle. I heard the slow sound of the bar being raised and the door swinging open. The friendly warmth rushed out, strong friendly hands pulled me, fainting, inside.”

He takes refuge here, a castle of the mind, the red numbers of his electric clock bleeding through the walls as the night progresses.

Long passages of “Pan” also take place at night, in bed. The book opens with a list of symptoms, including “light too bright,” “tingling in the fingers and toes,” and “the feeling that everything is strange.” Nick’s parents are divorced, and the panic attacks begin after Nick, having become incorrigible in adolescence, is ordered by his mom to go live with his dad in a subdivision called Chariot Courts, in Libertyville, Illinois, an exurb of Chicago. It seems to be the early nineties—Michael Jordan is playing for the Bulls—and the internet hasn’t infiltrated everyday life. Nick has to look up his diagnosis in the card catalogue at the library. It’s also a different era of parenting, when the suburban teen-ager was left with long stretches of solitude, in Nick’s case broken up by a summer job at Ace Hardware. Nick’s dad has chosen the divorced-guy aesthetic of barely decorating his house, and the two share silent, perfunctory microwave dinners.

The panic attacks first descend on Nick in geometry class. “I was sucking in too much air, or I wasn’t breathing enough out,” he says. “The rhythm was all wrong.” It happens again during a movie: “This time what I forgot was how to move blood through my body.” The third instance, he is in bed, reading “Ivanhoe,” and his panic attack integrates imagery from the crusades. “I was having a heart attack, and the Knight Templar looked down from atop his warhorse,” he narrates. “He had an evil gleam in his eye.” This time, he ends up in an emergency room, where a doctor explains what is going on. “What am I panicking about?” Nick asks. “Could be anything,” the doctor says. The rest of the novel becomes, more or less, about trying to find the source, and in the process testing out various theories of the mind.

Nick initially treats his recurrent attacks by breathing into paper bags. His best friend, Ty, and Nick’s new girlfriend, Sarah, take this idiosyncrasy in stride with the openness of fellow-misfits. Clune writes of adolescence with specificity—there’s the annoying younger kid who wants to sit with Nick on the bus, the windows on the bus that open exactly two inches, the hallucinatory anticipation of a blue-raspberry slushie at 7-Eleven. “The smell of cold sugar hit me as soon as the glass door slid back,” he says. “The hot blue morning pushing against the store’s windows, fluorescence like the underside of eyelids after staring at the sky.”

As he visits friends’ houses, Nick, whose Russian-born mother has a housecleaning business, registers subtle differences in class but does not yet order the world into a hierarchy. He perceives that much of adult identity is aspirational rather than lived—Ty’s mother, for example, has feminist books in the back of her minivan and yet stays with Ty’s father, whose physical abuse puts her life in danger. “Ty’s mom’s feminism seemed to be a kind of deep magic, one that left no discernible effect on the surface of her life,” Nick observes. He scans the world around him for portents and synchronicities, sensing a word before someone in a movie says it, noticing with dread as “Everybody Plays the Fool” is on at Ace Hardware and then again as background music during his biofeedback therapy. He seems to find a reference to panic in Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” which he reads after a woman leaves it on a chair at the library; then he and Sarah discover the connection between the word “panic” and the Greek god “Pan.” The revelations come fast and thick: “Salome’s a play,” Sarah says. “You interpreted the meaning of the play, which is the meaning of panic. You did theatrical criticism on Salome to understand panic, which comes from the god Pan, and Pan is the god of theatrical criticism.” It can be hard to keep track of these tangled epiphanies, but each one offers Nick a new framework—literature, psychotherapy, Buddhism, meditation, his parents’ divorce—through which to consider his condition.

“Panic is the opposite of cool,” Nick observes. “Cool is minimal consciousness. Approximation of the smooth, unblinking surface of polished stone or metal. Cool is alliance with the endless strength of the inorganic. Panic, on the other hand, is excess of consciousness.” He and Ty and Sarah begin meeting up with a group of new friends in nostalgic scenes in a barn beyond the edge of the suburbs. They listen to records; they take bong hits and do acid. (Nick, because of the panic attacks, avoids the drugs.) Under the guidance of a charismatic college-age older brother, they engage in cultlike rituals, a reminder that teen-age friendship can be as intense as religious fervor.

The long summers out in the barn end with a mystery that is never explained but which breaks up the group of friends. Nick’s panic evolves into a crippling insomnia that leaves him on the edge of psychosis. But the path of his self-inquiry eventually leads to a kind of resolution. First, it’s the revelation that one can only know one’s own experience after external confirmation. In Nick’s case, that happens through reading: “You needed to read about someone else leaving their head, for example, before you could truly accept that you felt that way.” The best cure for the chaos in his mind turns out to be channelling his wayward thoughts into writing. “Not escapism. Not like video games. 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.”

By this definition, Clune is a very good writer. He seems to have access to another realm of the mind, such as the Roman scene that recurs to him as he listens to Bach: “Figures, resplendent in richly colored togas—purple and red and gold—lay on cushions spread on the mosaic floor,” he writes. “At the far end the hall opened on a sunset scene: the sea lapping gently at the foot of a flight of marble stairs.”

But these imagistic moments can’t fully carry a story. At times, the book seems like a mashup of a critical history of panic and a horror movie about teen-agers evoking a dark force that never actually manifests. Heroin addiction and recovery have a built-in three-act structure: passion into danger and then back into the light of sobriety. A journey through panic attacks ends simply with coping strategies and calm. If one reads “Pan” somewhat autobiographically, and it’s difficult not to, heroin can be seen in the future, waiting to be discovered as a cure to an “excess of consciousness.”

“Pan” offers its own evocations, however: of the dramatic seasons of the suburban Upper Midwest; of the last era before our minds were beset with screens; of the languid way a teen-ager can pick up a stray book and discover inside of it a world of hidden meaning, which I was dismayed to find seemed to land as an experience of another era. ♦