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Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
James Sveck, the 18-year-old protagonist of Cameron's (The City of Your Final Destination) first novel for young adults, is a precocious, lonely and confused Manhattanite who believes he would be happier buying a house in Kansas surrounded by a sleeping porch than entering Brown University as planned and being surrounded by his peers. "I don't like people in general and people my age in particular," he explains, demonstrating his obsessive concern with language, "and people my age are the ones who go to college.... I'm not a sociopath or a freak (although I don't suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don't enjoy being with people." He claims people "rarely say anything interesting to each other," but his own observations are fresh and incisive as he reports on his exchanges at home and at work. As the novel opens, in July 2003, James's cynical older sister is having an affair with a married professor of language theory; his mother ditches her third husband on their Las Vegas honeymoon after he steals her credit cards to gamble; his high-powered father asks if he's gay; and James is stuck working at his mother's art gallery, which has mounted an exhibit by an artist with no name, of garbage cans decoupaged with pages torn out of the Bible, Koran and Torah. James's elaborate daily entries interlace with a series of flashbacks to gradually reveal the recent panic attack that has landed him in psychotherapy. Descriptions of these sessions offer not only more fodder for James's sardonic critiques of a self-indulgent society, but also an achingly tender portrait of a devastatingly alienated young man. A single reference yields something of an explanation: James saw, at close range, the planes crash into the Twin Towers. The closest he can come to commenting is to turn to a story about a woman whose disappearance after 9/11 went unnoticed for a month: "[It] didn't make me sad. I thought it was beautiful. To die like that... to sink without disturbing the surface of the water." With its off-balance marriage of the comedic and the deeply painful, its sympathetic embrace of its characters and its hard-won hope, this smart and elegantly written novel merits a wide readership. Ages 14-up. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(High School) James Sveck is eighteen, slated to go to Brown in the fall, spending the summer working at his mother's outre Manhattan art gallery with John, a brilliant black aesthete and the only person James really likes besides his grandmother. It's Catcher in the Rye in a very different voice -- witty, reflective, terse. The dialogue pings. Hear James vis-ê-vis his well-meaning, distracted mother, just back from a third marriage, undone on the honeymoon; James vis-ê-vis his earnest, executive-suite father, on the eve of an eye-lift; James vis-ê-vis his sister, a Barnard student so nasty she rattles herself. And for sheer delectation, James vis-ê-vis his parent-appointed therapist whom he almost immobilizes with his nonanswers. Still, something is clearly wrong. James wants to use his college-money to buy a house in the Midwest, of all things. He cuts out from a national teenage program, The American Classroom, and spends two nights alone in a D.C. hotel. Swinging from retreat to pursuit, he creates an online persona that John responds to, makes a date to meet him at a museum party, and then reveals his identity -- to John's fury and humiliation. Yes, James is gay, knows he's gay, minds only being asked. The heart of the matter: a desire to stay put and play safe, "not to move forward." 9/11 happened outside his classroom window. But with a propitious assurance from his grandmother and an unexpected, whispered "Please, James" from his sister, James takes a cautious first step away, one might say, from Ground Zero. Cameron, a respected author of adult fiction, has written a spare, spacious, quietly dazzling book for teens and former teens. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Though he's been accepted by Brown University, 18-year-old James isn't sure he wants to go to college. What he really wants is to buy a nice house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest Indiana, perhaps. In the meantime, however, he has a dull, make-work job at his thrice-married mother's Manhattan art gallery, where he finds himself attracted to her assistant, an older man named John. In a clumsy attempt to capture John's attention, James winds up accused of sexual harassment! A critically acclaimed author of adult fiction, Cameron makes a singularly auspicious entry into the world of YA with this beautifully conceived and written coming-of-age novel that is, at turns, funny, sad, tender, and sophisticated. James makes a memorable protagonist, touching in his inability to connect with the world but always entertaining in his first-person account of his New York environment, his fractured family, his disastrous trip to the nation's capital, and his ongoing bouts with psychoanalysis. In the process he dramatizes the ambivalences and uncertainties of adolescence in ways that both teen and adult readers will savor and remember.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I GREW up reading Peter Cameron; he made me want to write. For readers who want to be writers, books are N.F.L. game tapes: they demonstrate what types of plays can be successfully run. What Cameron showed in the mid1980s, his work appearing regularly in The New Yorker, was that stories could be assembled from moods. The odd sadness his young characters were prone to was something I'd never seen before. (Here's the conclusion to one story, "Homework": "Find the value of n such that n plus everything else in your life makes you feel all right. What would n equal? Solve for n.") The books that followed had hushed, marketresistant titles: "One Way or Another"; "Leap Year"; "The Weekend." Cameron's career seemed to be stuck; the quiet thing he liked to do had been shouted down by the culture. But he has at last published a book with a terrific title: "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You." And it's also his best work it's terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength. He offers dryice observations ("My grandmother is a firm believer in proper deportment; it is the closest she comes to any sort of religion"), memorable weather ("The sky went dark in a weird green swampy way that gave me a creepy endoftheworld feeling"), and emotions I didn't believe had descriptions ("I ... just let everything go, turned the net of myself inside out and let all the worried desperate fish swim away"). It's as if Cameron had taken the tools earned over a whole career and applied them to the materials of a first book. James Sveck, the Manhattanbred 18yearold narrator, doesn't connect with anyone. He's gotten into Brown, but can't decide whether to go at the end of the summer; something awful happened on a studentgroup tour through Washington that spring. The story of these two seasons will James ever unpack in his dorm, what exactly went down in D.C. is all Cameron gives us in the way of plot. Throughout, there's great stuff on the condiments of modern urban life: highrise law firms (his father's profession), art (his mother's), cosmetic surgery, jobs ("If everyone had to believe in the work he did, not much would get done in the world"), dogs, real estate, therapy. The book serves one of the traditional roles of fiction: you want to take it out to settle disputes. (Cameron includes a superb line about the uselessness of argument: "My mother was right, but that didn't change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind.") The book's subject is James's response system, which makes a smooth mesh with the rest of the world impossible. His great fear is of an existence that doesn't "touch or overlap with anyone else's, a sort of hermetically sealed life." The sequence of his nearbreakdown, when he becomes a runaway in the nation's capital, is a mesmerizing piece of work. It contains one of the few epiphanies in fiction brought on by exposure to dinner theater an allfemale production of "The Odd Couple," two former TV stars as the leads. "There was something very dignified and brave and sad about the entire thing the idea of what people can be reduced to, how variable one's life is, and the awful things people do to survive." James faces a teenage narrator's classic problem: adult perception without the deadening, reassuring glaze of adult experience. Cameron understands the choice young people are presented with: give up the sensitivity, or pass on the anesthesia. I wish I could have read this book as a teenager. Reading it as an adult reminded me just how much adolescence accompanies us through the bulk of our lives, as we take on new apprenticeships as lovers, employees and friends. The young adult category is the sort of irony James might appreciate. If this novel were a movie, it would probably rate a PG13; there's cursing, but no sex and no real violence. The violence rests in the uses to which a day might put you, if your helmet slips, if the armor wobbles. So there is a genius stroke to landing Cameron on the young readers' shelf. He will make a large portion of his audience, especially those who look for relief in books, feel excitingly understood. And he has a rarer ability: he will make many of them itch to write. David Lipsky is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Cameron's first young adult novel is a bildungsroman, a brief and situational portrait of 18-year-old James Sveck, a New York loner who dreams of bypassing college and settling down, solo, in the Midwest. James knows he's different: he doesn't really like people, especially those his age, and, following what he calls a "disastrous" experience at a national student seminar, concludes that he is better off alone. His sole attempt at connection reflects his reluctance and fear to relate to others and, ironically, it is this effort to explain and maintain his distance from others that is at the heart of his appeal. When he discovers a coworker's profile on a gay dating site, James, out of boredom, crafts one of his own to match what he believes the man wants. The ruse works too well and he succeeds in attracting the man's attention as well as his anger at being manipulated. The first-person narrative alternates between the present-the fleeting days of summer-and the near past as, encouraged by his therapist, the teen recalls his experience at the student seminar. Like Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (MTV, 1999), Cameron's understated novel takes the intellectual antihero as its subject. Where readers are drawn to Chbosky's incongruously innocent and wise narrator, it may be more difficult to identify with James, whose linguistic sophistication may hold them at a distance and whose outlook is not as optimistic as Charlie's and is distinctly more cerebral.-Amy S. Pattee, Simmons College, Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Cameron's meticulously voiced novel begins as a comedy of manners, wittily disarticulating a certain class of New Yorker, so it takes the reader awhile to catch onto the fact that it's actually a story about the psychological pain that comes from loneliness and the difficulty in making emotional connections. The virtuoso first-person narrative is related by the protagonist, James Sveck, an 18-year-old boy who is as smart as he is alienated. Hiding his fears behind a curtain of disinterested contempt, James, who is gay but unwilling to either discuss or test it, likes only two people in his life, his wise and accepting grandmother and the man who manages his mother's art gallery. In the course of the story, James comes to realize that he can't wall himself off forever, finally making a maladroit and unsuccessful attempt to reach out. Cameron's power is his ability to distill a particular world and social experience with great specificity while still allowing the reader to access the deep well of our shared humanity. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You We sat for a moment in silence, and then the waiter delivered our meals. My father glanced at my plate of pasta, but said nothing. He cut into his nearly raw beef and smiled at the blood it drooled. "So," he said, after he had taken a bite, "you're not going to tell me." "Not going to tell you what?" "Whether or not you're gay." "No," I said. "Why should I? Did you tell your parents?" "I wasn't gay," said my father. "I was straight." "So, what, if you're gay you have a moral obligation to inform your parents and if you're straight you don't?" "James, I'm just trying to be helpful. I'm just trying to be a good father. You don't have to get hostile. I just thought you might be gay, and if you were, I wanted to let you know that's fine, and help you in whatever way I could." "Why might you think I was gay?" "I don't know. You just seem - well, let's put it this way: you don't seem interested in girls. You're eighteen, and as far as I know you've never been on a date." I said nothing. "Am I wrong? Or is that true?" "Just because I've never been on a date doesn't mean I'm gay. And besides, no one goes on dates anymore." "Well, whatever - normal kids hang out. They go out." Excerpted from Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.