Christmas is a wonderful time of year to worry about our relationship with things. The world of objects can feel especially weighty during the holiday season, and so, by the first of January, many of us resolve to pare down, focus on what really matters, and let all the mere stuff fade into the background.
But can we really be so sure that, once we dig out from underneath all our clutter and material attachments, we’ll find ourselves inhabiting a healthy, clear mind? And is our stuff really just idle and mute baggage the way we tend to think? That is, is there really such a huge gulf between the kind of thing I am and the kind of thing we unwrap on Christmas morning? How can I be sure that I am special, that I am an I? There is, of course, an august tradition of anxiety around these questions. René Descartes, for example, sat alone in an Amsterdam apartment wondering if his hands might not be his own. Appearances deceive, after all. “Suppose,” Descartes starts to panic, “that I don’t even have hands or any body at all.”
Fixating on the relationship between minds and objects too long can induce a kind of madness, so it’s fitting that two recent coming-of-age novels about mental illness do just that. Sometimes I think of mental illness as an object—something separate from me that I can observe with wary eyes. But if it is a thing, it’s a strange kind of thing: a thing that talks back. Mental illness is like a book in that way: both are objects that can loosen our grip on ourselves.
Michael Clune’s Pan (Penguin Press, $29, 336 pp.) and Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Penguin Books, $19, 560 pp.) explore the power of art and madness to torment and enchant. In both, an adolescent boy experiences disturbing psychic symptoms, dismisses the explanations offered by doctors and therapists, and goes on a journey—accompanied by an oddball cast of characters—to come to terms with his own mind. In Clune’s novel, our hero’s descent begins with a Cartesian realization that his hands are a thing, whereas in Ozeki’s, the things themselves start to do the talking.
With The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ozeki, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, gives us a self-consciously maximalist novel. It follows Benny Oh, a thirteen-year-old boy whose father, a jazz clarinetist with a substance-abuse problem, dies after being run over by a truck filled with live chickens. Benny, in his grief, starts hearing voices coming from everyday objects, while his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem. Eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, Benny tries to achieve some control over the voices that, at their worst, command him to punch holes in his arms with scissors. Along the way, he befriends two denizens of the local library: The Aleph (a very pretty drug-addicted runaway with a moniker sourced from a Borges short story and a hobby of crafting snow globes that depict environmental catastrophe) and The Bottleman (a homeless Marxist “philosopher” with a drinking problem who closely resembles Slavoj Žižek). The Book of Form and Emptiness also features a self-help sage in the mold of Marie Kondo, an ill-conceived Donald Trump subplot, and lengthy meditations on the work of philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. (Annabelle herself is a stand-in for Benjamin’s “Angel of History.”)
The philosophical dilemma structuring the novel is stated clearly on the page: “What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there any limit to the desire for more?” In answering these questions, Ozeki draws on Marxist critique, environmental philosophy, and Zen Buddhism. According to Ozeki’s Marxist animism, we crave material things because our capitalist order is organized around the endless accumulation of value. But objects aren’t just enchanting because of marketing; the material world really does vibrate with energy. We should not be so surprised to hear our stuff speak. Ultimately, Ozeki orients us toward an ethics of reverence and care, grounded in a recognition of the essential impermanence of human desire.
Is the novel overstuffed with theory? Is it homiletic? Twee? Certainly, but it won me over nonetheless. As Benjamin once wrote, “Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.” The Book of Form and Emptiness is a testament to the pleasures of precarious art.
Pan, the astonishing and disorienting debut novel by critic and memoirist Michael Clune, immerses us in the mind of an adolescent neurotic. Nicholas, a fifteen-year-old child of divorce living in a crappy lower-middle-class suburb of Chicago, begins to experience panic attacks with an especially philosophical bent. Nick’s symptoms begin with a horrifying realization: his body—his hands, his nose, maybe even his mind—are things. Nick then feels his entire sense of subjective coherence unravel. “I could come out of my body,” he testifies. “My looking/thinking could pour out.” After discovering that the word panic originates with Pan, the Greek god of the wild, Nick develops a theory that his mind may be under occupation by Pan himself.
Nick’s Pan theory becomes central to the life of a small cult called The Barn, where Nick becomes a “semi-sacred personage.” Under the guidance of Ian, a college student with a history of terrorizing his girlfriends, the Barn group engages in a sequence of drugged-out Dionysian rituals involving sex and mice. At one point, Nick’s crush, Sarah, initiates sex in the hope of transferring Pan’s presence to her own mind. Ian watches this unsuccessful experiment in secret from the corner of the room. Not cool. Confoundingly, Nick continues to hang out with the gang for a little while longer.
If other people can’t provide real solace, then perhaps art might offer the grounding Nick needs. As he falls out with the Barn crowd, Nick begins journaling about his anxiety, hoping to assert some control over his experience. “Tonight,” Nick declares, “I’ll write about all this so it’s mine.” It works for a bit, but Pan is far too unruly a god to be kept at bay for long. Making experience safe, Clune insists, is not at all the writer’s vocation. Rather, art’s purpose is to give experience fixity, to make it eternal—to make it feel like it did the first time.
Pan’s outlook is ultimately a lonely one. By the novel’s end, the reader is left wondering if there’s anyone Nick can talk with. In this loneliness, at least, Nick is far from alone. After moving back into his mother’s windswept house near Route 94, Nick muses:
The Highway is the public’s public presence. Each person is enclosed in their speeding shell of plastic and metal, with the stereo and sometimes even the television turned on, insulated from the others. They see only the few shells around them, and they hear them not all. They are inside the public place, but not of it.
A perceptive observation from young Nick, but he seems to assume that these drivers, walled off in public, must therefore lead lives of unremitting loneliness. After all, it would be juvenile to dismiss the possibility that some of those shell-encased people are racing to see people they love. Sophistry often accompanies adolescent mental illness. One grows out of it by learning that some things and people are more interesting than the jumbled contents of one’s own brain. During an anxious Christmas season, if the ground starts to give beneath our feet, we might cleave to the hope that there will be someone close at hand to listen and draw us out of our own minds. Or maybe it will be something. I hear Santa is bringing some good stuff this year.
