Do Panic

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?