Jessi Jezewska Stevens at Bookforum.
ON THE SURFACE, Pan is the coming-of-age story of an ordinary teenage boy struggling with severe panic attacks while doing ordinary teenage things (losing his virginity, fretting over his popularity, negotiating rides to strip malls in the wake of his parents’ divorce) in suburban Illinois. On another level, it’s about a teenager who has possibly been possessed by Pan, the ancient Greek god of the wild, and who falls in with a cult of troubled young drug addicts who attempt to exorcise him.
Nick is initially concerned his “mental illness” will seem “weird.” He has reason to worry—and I am protective enough of the strange, idiosyncratic beauty of this book to worry in turn that some readers might not be up to the challenge of following his more baroque trains of thought. Precociously philosophical, Nick is the kind of fifteen-year-old who tunes out in geometry class while mentally plotting his experiences along axes named “OPEN/CLOSED.” He spends a great deal of time wondering where thoughts come from, convinced that his own feel like flies “bumping along the underside of my scalp.”
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