Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel - Hardcover

Cameron, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374309892 ISBN 13: 9780374309893

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2007

Synopsis

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.  Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Advance praise for Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

"Not since The Catcher in the Rye has a novel captured the deep and almost physical ache of adolescent existential sadness as trenchantly as the perfectly titled Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. You don't have to be eighteen to relate to James Dunfour Sveck and his sense of alienation from a world he doesn't understand, nor to be profoundly moved by his story. Told with compassion, insight, humor, and hope, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You deserves to be read by readers of all ages for years to come. I would have loved it as a teenager, and I love it now." --James Howe, author of The Misfits

"As I drew near the end of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, I read more and more slowly because I didn't want to leave James. With his devotion to precise English, his dislike of most other people--especially those his own age--and his adoration of his grandmother and old houses, James is the ideal antihero and companion. And, most important of all, he never utters a dull sentence. This is
a riveting, suspenseful, witty, and very funny novel." --Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona

"Peter Cameron is one of my favorite writers, and this is one of his best books, a shrewd, funny, and at times painful story about the difficulty of becoming an adult. James is a wonderful narrator--brilliant and witty, remarkably observant, and just a little infuriating. His voice is so irresistible you'll hate to put the book down."  --Stephen McCauley, author of Alternatives to Sex

"The effect that comes from reading this comedic and beautiful novel is one that I particularly love and only happens with certain books--this feeling that you madly adore the narrator, that you've made this new intimate friend, and that for a little while (the duration of the book, at least) you're a little bit less alone in the world." --Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man

About the Author

PETER CAMERON's work has appeared in The New Yorker and he is the author of several novels for adults, including Andorra and The City of Your Final Destination. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0374309892
• ISBN 13: 9780374309893
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 229