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Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

By Peter Cameron

(35)

| Hardcover | 9780374309893

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Book Description

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 farContinue

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.

Critics

  • Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

    In Peter Cameron's new novel, his eighth work of fiction, the narrator is a disaffected teenage product of divorced, self-involved, and privileged parents. He is thus so emblematic of a typical upper-middle-class experience today that there is from t ... (read full critics)

    barnesandnoble published on Wed, 1 Sep 2010

  • The Awkward Age

    Peter Cameron is an urban novelist with an interest in the angle and viscosity of sunlight. He is an observer of greenery—”it was impossible to walk along that gravel path by the sea and not think palm frond shadow“—and the strength and direction of ... (read full critics)

    nybooks published on Wed, 25 Aug 2010

2 Reviews

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  • 3 people find this helpful

    "I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How did you know?"

    Già, bella domanda...

    Is this helpful?

    Gabriele said on Jun 6, 2010 | 2 feedbacks

  • 1 person find this helpful

    Having never read Catcher in the Rye, I can't speak for how much James Sveck is like Holden Caufield, but he's for sure an intriguing character, wrapped up in his angst, anti-socialism and elitism. For a book centering around unhappiness, it was actually a very fun read.

    Is this helpful?

    Jaemi K said on Dec 25, 2007 | Add your feedback

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