I felt very weird and shaky and I couldn't stop thinking of the strip mall in flames. When James flees a difficult social situation and finds himself running past a strip mall, he observes, "I felt as if I had escaped from a house on fire I was actually panting. James witnesses the attacks on the World Trade Center, though Cameron mostly handles this indirectly, or by suggestion. 11 into the story so subtly that only one or two explicit references make their way into the text. However, the novel is set in 2003, and the reader can't help wondering if James' search for a "safe" place to live isn't partly a response to the terrorist attacks two years earlier.Ĭameron weaves the shadow of Sept. Nobody around him quite understands why an 18-year-old boy should develop a sudden passion for Midwestern real estate. Instead, he longs for beautiful old houses, preferably in some cozy town far from New York City, where he currently lives. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You is the story of James Sveck, who is facing his upcoming freshman year of college with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. There is a certain guilty pleasure of diving in, which comes from acknowledging that it's awkward to be an introvert in a world of extroverts that the teen years are usually not the best years of our lives, despite all hype to the contrary and that it can be terrifying to reach out for the things we want. So hooked, that since then, I've actually bought copies and given them away to total strangers - it's a rather embarrassing practice, but that is how much I want to create a word-of-mouth movement that would rouse the world into recognizing the book's sheer excellence.
In the first two pages, in which the narrator refers to his sister as "a bit of a linguistic zealot" and worries about his mother's announcing "in a disturbing brainwashy way" that she plans to spend her third honeymoon in a city she hates, I was hooked. I picked up Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron, in a bookstore. Jennifer Hubbard is the author of the upcoming novel Try Not to Breathe. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You Author Peter Cameron
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