David Lipsky
…his best work—it's terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength. He offers dry-ice 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 end-of-the-world 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.
—The New York Times
School Library Journal
Gr 10 Up
Peter Cameron has crafted a sharp, biting tale (Farrar, 2007) that deservedly has been compared to J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye . The translation to audiobook format is just short of brilliant. Eighteen-year-old James Sveck lives with his upper-crust family in New York City and is ambivalent about many things: his Ivy League future at Brown, his sexual orientation, his dislike of kids his own age. The people in James' life include an artsy mother who came home from her honeymoon alone, a pretentious sister, his smart and funny grandmother, and his co-worker at his mother's art gallery. James meanders through the summer sharing his observations of the world around him. Alarmed at his insistence that he has no use for college, his parents force him into therapy. When James turns inward to examine his ambivalence, the story takes a serious turn. The divorce of his parents left scars and his high school was close to ground zero on September 11th. Narrator Lincoln Hoppe perfectly captures James' wit, sarcasm, pain. The ending is rather abrupt and we never fully understand James' motivations, but this won't be problematic for listeners. With strong language and mature themes, this is a story for older teens.-Tricia Melgaard, Centennial Middle School, Broken Arrow, OK
Kirkus Reviews
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)
From the Publisher
His best work—it's terrific, piercing, and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength.” —David Lipsky, The New York Times Book Review
“James Sveck is a brilliant wit of a character whose voice will echo long after his story ends.” —Kristin Kloberdanz, Chicago Tribune
“Deliciously vital right from the start . . . a piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron's best book . . . It is a bravura performance, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a stunning little book. ” —Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books
“Cameron's prose handily marries the tangled logic of adolescence to simple, beautiful language.” —Peter Terzian, Newsday
“Beautifully conceived and written . . . funny, sad, tender, and sophisticated.” —Michael Cart, Booklist
