Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel

by Peter Cameron

Overview

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him–including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected.

"Possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem" (Peter Gadol, LA Weekly), Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the insightful, powerfully moving story of a young man questioning his times, his family, his world, and himself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312428167
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/28/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	871,431
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.54(h) x 0.64(d)
Lexile:	930L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

PETER CAMERON is the author of several novels, including Andorra and The Weekend. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

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.”

Reading Group Guide

About this Guide
The following author biography and list of questions about Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.

About the Book
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him—including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected.

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.

About the Author
Peter Cameron's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Grand Street. He is the author of the adult novels The City of Your Final Destination, Andorra, and The Weekend. Cameron has also taught courses at Columbia University, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Oberlin College. He lives in New York City.

1. Reflect on the opening quotations. Do they set a tone for the book? How does the Denton Welch quotation expand upon the one from Ovid?

2. James believes adults have the ability to deceive themselves (p. 4). Does James include himself among adults? Why or why not? Does he deceive himself? Is James a reliable narrator?

3. When James is relating emotionally charged scenes, he often digresses or makes observations that seem to be only loosely connected to the subject at hand. What purpose do these digressions/observations serve? What do they reveal about James? What pathos to they add to the scenes? Consider the scene on page 7: James's mother has come home from her honeymoon early and alone, demanding a glass of water. As James watches her drink, he's reminded that birds with their heads tilted back, beaks open, will drown in a rainstorm. Find and discuss other examples.

4. James is always looking at houses on-line. What do you think he is seeking?

5. Why doesn't James want to go to college? How does the "horrible experience" (p. 39) in Washington, D.C. affect his decision? Why does it take so long for James to describe this experience? What is it about Nareem's invitation that propels him to run (pp. 116–117)?

6. Search online for images of the Thomas Cole paintings described on pages 129–131. Discuss James's reaction to them.

7. James likes his coworker, John Webster, very much. Why, then, does James post a false profile on Gent4Gent to entice John? John is hurt and angry and confronts James. How does this episode help James define the man he wants to become?

8. James indicates that one of his favorite people is his grandmother Nanette. Why? Examine his description of her and her house. Is his perception of Nanette influencing his dream of a home in Kansas? What realization about college does James have while sitting in her kitchen?

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

…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

David Lipsky

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

School Library Journal

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)

Kirkus Reviews