Pan, by Michael Clune: A Splatter Pattern of Images, Light, and Color

I love it when a book unwittingly (or perhaps very wittingly) describes itself. Here's a sentence from Michael Clune's debut novel, Pan: "Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of the world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer."

Good writing -- which this book decidedly exhibits -- describes the world in new ways. It attempts to take something common and make it extraordinary, to render something recognizable with a fresh veneer, to give readers a new and original way of looking at the world.

No wonder writing is so goddamn difficult. 

In Pan, though, Michael Clune succeeds in doing exactly what his character describes as good writing: He uses an array of linguistic acrobatics to make a story deeper, more mysterious, and richer. A seemingly straightforward plot about a teenager suffering from panic attacks and anxiety and trying to figure out why and how to ease his pain is rendered both recognizable and empathetic, but also completely fresh.

Readers often bandy about the cliché that good writers just see the world differently than normal people. Do they, though? Or are they just able to describe their experiences of the world better than anyone else? 

In fact, that's really what this novel is about: How do each of see the world? How are our experiences, both external and internal, unique or universal? How do we tell? Sometimes something that seems universal might be actually be unique. 

There's the classic color conundrum, which I honestly think about quite a lot. So I nearly fell off my chair when I read this sentence from Clune: "No one knows how color really looks to anyone else. It's the definition of a private experience. All we share are the names." 

Clune then goes off on a long tangent about the color of the sky in Gilligan's Island, which is both hilarious and profound, and an example of the many joys in reading this book. 

Indeed, in total, this novel is a splatter pattern of descriptions of images and light and color literally unlike anything I've ever read. Language in Clune's writing is malleable, formable, turn-able, twistable, and the result is writing so unexpectedly fresh and original, it was hard for me to put this book down. Not because the plot was riveting, but just because I couldn't wait to see what new joys the next sentence would bring. 

Almost unfailingly, the next sentence was surprising. I probably read this book way too quickly -- sometimes I got a little lost in the abstractions. Or maybe they were just too abstract and worked better in Clune's brain than they did on the page? Either way, this novel is truly a singular reading experience.