Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You | Peter Cameron | A hilarious yet slightly watered down...

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You | Peter Cameron | The Therapy of Pain

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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 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It?s time for eighteen-year-old James Sveck to begin his freshman year at Brown. Instead, he?s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary?a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he?s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope?or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James?s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James?s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie.

In the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Booklist has hailed Cameron as ?one of the best writers about middle-class youth since Salinger?), Peter Cameron paints an indelible portrait of a teenage hero holding out for a better grownup world.

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A hilarious yet slightly watered down Catcher in the Rye

I was a bit skeptical about this book at first because I found it in the "teen" section of my local public library. It was recommended to me by one of my friends who said it was probably her favorite book of the moment. So I decided to give it a shot. From the very first page, STPWBUTY had me both laughing and empathizing with James the narrator. Cameron's funny, honest and clever novel struck me as a kind of modern Catcher in the Rye. WHen I say "modern" i only mean modern in the sense that it was written recently, because like the Catcher in the Rye, STPWBUTY deals with the timeless 'coming-of-age' issues faced by many around high school or college age - fear of the next big step in life, anger and hostility at your family, alienation and loneliness, and finding someone you can relate to in a sea of people whose phoniness and pretensions are seemingly overwhelming.

Much of the meaning or "moral of the story" in STPWBUTY is revealed in the title itself. Several times the author mentions the idea that there are some experiences in life that may be terrible and unpleasant at the time but are really necessary and important. The idea that that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger is the message here, but it's not presented in an in your face kind of preachy way. I didn't feel like as I was reading I was just listening to my parents / teachers / authority remind me all over again like I was in grade school that 'everything is a learning experience." STPWBUTY is truly a fun read that has a wise message no less.

Just out of curiosity, I read the reviews of the Catcher in the Rye, and it seems like many of the low starring reviewers of both books have some of the same complaints: like Holden Caulfield, James Sveck is a snobby, insipid teenager who needs to get over himself and stop bitching. But honestly if that's all you're getting out of either The Catcher in the Rye or Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, you're completely missing the point of both. I mean, I will grant you that both Holden and James ARE a little whiny, stuck up, and unwillingly stubborn. The phrase "it's not the destination but the journey that matters" really fits. Or something along those lines. Being in high school myself I can really relate to both books and many of the sentiments expressed in each. I think when I reread these books years from now these feelings will still be relevant because they are about struggles that ultimately are nonspecific to teenagers and shared by all people, in all stages of life. I really enjoyed this book.

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The Therapy of Pain

Young James is as curious as the garbage cans he tries to sell as art: Does he have a purpose in this strange and foreign adult world, or is he a mere abstraction - something others revel at in oblivious ignorance or disdain with feigned understanding. And while James perceives with remarkable acuity the issues of his professionally successful but personally aloof father and his kind but flakey mother, he is completely unable to assess his own behavior, let alone his feelings - his love? With a delightfully sardonic wit, Mr. Cameron presents a fascinating and hysterical look into the mystery of youth and the challenge of exploring adulthood when forced to confront the possibility of being gay. For these and other reasons, the novel is must read, particularly for a bright but struggling young adult.

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Growing Up Is Hard

This book is a true find. A slice of life of a teenage boy facing the problems and fears of growing up. This author is truly gifted for the novel is written with the young adult audience in mind but it can also be enjoyed by adults of any age. I am a 47 year old male and loved it. I also picture the book being required reading in a literature class in high school or college.

Some reviewers have said they don't like the main character. What is so special about this book is he has a true voice. Society often looks upon teenagers as unimportant and their thoughts/dreams/hopes are a mystery. Here James is a fully realized, believable character with his own ideas, problems and attitudes about life.

The book is rather short and when done you see it had little plot and took place over a short period of time. This is what makes it work so well. It is all about James and how he sees life and it can't help but make you look at your own life. It will give other teenagers permission to look into their own souls and validate their own attitudes, ideas and feelings. For adults as myself it makes you remember what being that age was truly like and how even as adults we still look at life as a mystery with many questions. We never know all the answers.

For me James was a pleasure for he was truly his own person and did learn by the things life threw at him. This novel is highly recommended to all. I hope it gets all the true attention it deserves.

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Something was missing

Overall, I think this book was well-written and did capture the 18-year old mindset pretty well. Yes, he was annoying and crabby at times, but I think that made it true to life. There was some humorous stuff, like the cartoonish characters on the DC trip and the artist with no name. But some of the characters were poorly developed, like the mother, who was too over the top. I just felt like something was missing when I finished this book. It just seemed to end without having gone anywhere. Sometimes that can work in a novel, especially one written from a teenager's point of view, but I didn't think it really worked here. It kind of made the read feel pointless when it just ended. A bit disappointing.

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another Holden

I did not like Catcher in the Rye. Not the first time I read it (in high school) and not the second time (in my 20s). And this book is little more than Catcher in the Rye updated for the 21st century. Except they still use words like "faggy".

James, which at least is a better name than Holden, has not been kicked out of school, but has just graduated from high school and is considering not going to college, although he's scheduled to begin at Brown in the fall. Aside from a somewhat meaningless job, he spends his time being introspective and disaffected, and seems determined to remain so. He does strange, antisocial things for no apparent reason and with no apparent thought of the consequences and then not quite understanding why people are upset about what he did.

I can't quite put my finger on why I had a problem with this book, or why I don't like Catcher in the Rye. I guess characters who know they're acting in an asocial way and refuse to acknowledge why other people might think they're a little strange just bother me. It's fine to be asocial, but a character (at least an intelligent character, as both James and Holden are supposed to be), ought to have enough insight to understand that they're outside the norm, which is going to be troubling to some people.

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

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