Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You | Peter Cameron

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You | Peter Cameron | Facing Adulthood

books:

Someday This Pain ...

	Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You Peter Cameron Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Gem of a Book!

I very much enjoyed several of Peter Cameron's earlier books, Andorra, Weekend and another book thta takes places in urguary whose name excapes me at the moment, and was, therefore, positively pre-disposed to this book and I was not disappointed.I found this oddly named book a wonderful and highly involved reading experience ..yes, ti did remind me of Catcher in the Rye but I found it quite contemporary and wished that it would have continued on since James became more and more an interesting observer of all around him and I wished to experience more of his impending life rather than "letting him go" as he went off to college at Brown ..and, with the rest of his life experiences.

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Facing Adulthood

Cameron, Peter. "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You", Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2007.

Facing Adulthood

Amos Lassen

Coming-of-age is never easy but it is very hard in cynical tines. James Sveck is a cynic growing up surrounded by cynics in Peter Cameron's new novel, "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You". Here is a novel written beautifully and crafted with great skill that not only is endearing but humorous as well. It is a novel about today and Cameron manages to capture the cynicism and with sarcastic irony the period in which we live today. James, our hero, observes all that is happening around him as he leaves high school and prepares for college at Brown University.
The sarcastic title of the book sets the tone for the novel and as we meet our socially antagonistic hero we learn that he is emotionally distant, obsessed with himself and that his parents are upper class and have divorced. It is his summer before college and he really doesn't want to go because he knows that he will have to interact with others. He spends that summer working at his mother's art gallery or going off to visit his grandmother or going to a therapist which his parents felt was a good idea after he supposedly had a nervous breakdown the year before while on a school trip.
James's fears, dreams and compulsions and passions are handled with lyrical writing by Cameron. It is never really clear if is gay but he does show the desire to be loved by the gay manager of his mother's gallery. He is frightened of life and Cameron is able to beautifully depict that with his writing. We also get an excellent satire of the art world and its pretentiousness.
Cameron tells us a tale of a culture where almost everyone is born again or undergoing therapy because they are unable to connect with the world which is devoid of idealism. This is seen through the eyes of a young man who doubts that he will find his own way in the world we live in.

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nothing less than hearbreaking

reading Peter Cameron is always a welcome experience -- though one that does not occur frequently enough. with "Someday..." i was thrown back into the pain and anxiety and yearning of my teenage years -- emotions which have carried into adulthood. James' desires are universal -- to find love and be loved. the writing is subtle and James' voice is clear, articulate and authentic. James feels like a kindred spirit -- exasperating, precocious, and tender. i wish i could tell him that it gets better with age, though that would not entirely be true. but like the title, with pain, comes a more mature outlook.

i was moved and didn't want the book to end. the one criticism, is the the ending felt somewhat arbitrary and rushed. i hope cameron will return to james at some point, though perhaps he has already offered us all that needs to be written about james.

along with andre aciman's "call me by by name," these two books belong together on a bookshelf, to be re-visited and remembered.

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Imperfect but Still Sweet

Cameron offers in his novel a portrait of a boy on the last stage of childhood - his hero is free from the confinements of secondary school he hated and not quite ready to enter university he is rather afraid of but which awaits him with open arms. This is the moment (generally speaking) when The Catcher in the Rye also starts and This Pain starts with enough momentum to make the reader believe we have a 21st century Catcher here. We don't. What starts so well soon grinds to a halt like a car with not enough fuel. Too many characters on board may be a problem too - they are interesting and at least to a degree credible but the stage gets a little too crowded for a little monodram we would expect.
Cameron manages very successfully to depict his character, his flaws and failures, but he fails to deliver a story that would both suit this character, and keep the reader interested. The book will not be wasted on James' peers who may share his problems and fears but it may not be enough to hold an older audience for long.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6

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