Cameron has created a little, enjoyable masterpiece

books:


	• Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You Peter Cameron Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I hate the main character but love the book!

You know a book is great when you feel attached to the protagonist. It can work both ways however ; You can either really like him, or really hate him. For this particular book, it was the latter. This eighteen year old kid is a cynic. An uncaring and overly dramatic cynic. There were so many times I just wanted to bash his brain into the ground and beat some sense into him. That's not to say that the book is badly written, however. It's a great read! I sure do hope I'll never meet a guy like James Sveck, though.

Cameron has created a little, enjoyable masterpiece

Peter Cameron gives us a breezy, sophisticated summer reading (but it will prove a perennial, sturdy and always apt) that packs a punch. A central character you will not want to forget and will wonder about as if he were a real person. We meet James here. Sequels could follow. It is not likely he will ever be as fresh. It is a highly literate novel in which all characters display immense respect for language in the ordinary functions of living, and when they speak, they consciously try to use languge in the most effective and correct way....... now, isn't that a delight?!.... and from a volume, so deliciously slight. The solemn and Victorian "Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You" is precariously perched on an undercurrent of humor that occassionally comes to the surface as unrestrained laughter. It is mostly very funny. Though Pain is indeed there, and not only in James, don't be mislead by the title: Pain can also be funny if the elements of humor are identified and allowed full rein within the proprieties of atmosphere and style. Peter Cameron's characters are masters at doing so. The title itself is a tongue in cheek tribute to optimistic literature of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Underneath the detritus of upper middle class New York living, its substance and its pretensions, these people can manage themselves quite well, faux passes and all. Maybe it has to do with their concern for not only the correctness, but the rightness of the English they speak so well. Get the book. It can be read in a day or a day and a half leisurely. You will be glad you read it. May even pass it on to an offspring, preferebly a boy.

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Should Win An Alex award

Someday this pain will be useful to you is a Young Adult book that should be in both the YA and the Adult fiction sections of bookstores and libraries, so no one of any age will miss it. It's beautifully and intelligently written and 18 yr old James Sveck gripped my heart. He's a serious and sympathetic New York teen trapped in his mind and stunted by what he expects of himself and others. The way his mind wraps around the things people say and do-- the human condition: observing it and untangling it is intriguing and totally absorbing. That James is not a knee-jerk teen but rather pensive, deliberate, and literal provides insight into a world of interesting adult characters that inhabit his life: his parents--divorced and self-absorbed-- his older sister, a co-worker and his therapist (the sessions are fantastic.)An incredibly compelling read with a character I can't stop thinking about, I won't forget. I could easily reread it again and again.

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young adult

this is a great coming of age book.
Great for young adults (and parents too)

SUPERB

This deceptively slim novel has no significant bells and whistles, and its plot, what there is of it, is ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. But oh how it will take your breath away. This book has the sting of truth in every sentence, and I devoured it in less than 2 days - I read it with more gusto than anything I've read in the last few years. The writing is actually dazzling, and you will remember with an ache these delightfully dysfunctional people, so carefully rendered, so beautifully observed.

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

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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