Peter Cameron, Marian Seldes, Jackie Hoffman, and Frank DeCaro at a party to celebrate the publication of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.
for more photos, see galllery
Lorrie Moore reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in
"Deliciously vital right from the start...Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron's best book: it retains the lucid and unlabored prose of his previous ones but wastes less time; it may be his most successful novel on its own terms -- terms that are not as modest as they may initially seem...What Peter Cameron has done is written a sophisticated and adult book. Neither young adult literature, nor even really a coming-of-age story, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is most surprisingly of all the subtlest September 11 novel yet written. So accomplished is its subtlety that one is not even aware of this novel's true subject until three quarters of the way through, and then its mention...rises up out of the story's barely submerged anxiety and casts on the book a sudden, brilliant light. It is a bravura performance, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a stunning little book."
to read the entire review, please click here
David Lipsky reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in
"His best work — it’s terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength...He will make a large portion of his audience, especially those who look for relief in books, feel excitingly understood. And he has a rarer ability: he will make many of them itch to write."
to read the complete review, click here
Michael Lowenthal recommends
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in the
"The book both fits within and smashes any number of literary molds: coming-of-age novel, New York novel, 9/11 novel. From the first sentence, you'll be snagged by its precocious, funny-sad narrator and his you'd-pay-to-hear-him-read-the-phone-book voice."
Michael Lowenthal is the author of Charity Girl, which is now available in paperback.
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Peter Terzian reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You in
"Peter Cameron's novels and story collections - such as The Weekend andThe City of Your Final Destination - are kept on the fiction shelves of your local library or bookstore, but you'll most likely find his new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, in the young adult section. Cameron didn't set out to write a young adult novel, but his publisher is cross-marketing the book to teenagers because its narrator is a troubled 18-year-old boy. Was this a good idea? Grown-ups may be resistant to the idea of reading a young adult book. Teenagers, on the other hand, might not be able to single the book out from a genre stuffed with badly written "issue" fiction. Either way, it will be a shame if Cameron's book doesn't find a following on both sides of the age divide. It's the kind of novel that could be a great solace to an 18-year-old...His highly cultured, dryly funny voice, which seduces the reader from the first page on, makes Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You appealing to adult readers as well."
to read the entire review, click here
Kristin Kloberdanze reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in
The Chicago Tribune
James Sveck likes his grandmother and the late introverted British author Denton Welch. That's about it. He has no friends, his family doesn't get him, and he can't quite wrap his mind around his awkward attraction to John, an older gay colleague at his mother's dull Manhattan art gallery. He is antisocial, cynical, prone to anxiety attacks and a little bit depressed -- and his narration of life is quite droll and affecting...James Sveck is a brilliant wit of a character whose voice will echo long after his story ends."
to read the entire review, click here
Peter Gadol reviews
Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You
in
"For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Peter Cameron’s astonishing novel is being sold as a Young Adult novel. Granted, the charmingly neurotic and endearing, proto-gay, boy-genius, first-person narrator, James Sveck, is 18 and muddling through a long hot summer before he’s supposed to matriculate at Brown (and, of course, he doesn’t want to go), which is to say a ripe angsty hero for YA readers; and granted, as YA fiction (where lately so much innovative and risky literature is being published), the book will open up city living, the gallery world, online dating, existential geekdom and the conundrum of sexual identity for its target audience in fresh new ways. But my fear is that Adult Adult readers will overlook what is possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem (that’s LOL to the YA set). Sveck leapfrogs Holden Caufield into the 21st century, and it’s about time Peter Cameron, the urbane, astutely observant author of Andorra, The City of Your Final Destination and The Weekend gained the wider audience he richly deserves. So I take back what I said: With young folk facebooking each other about STPWBUTY, maybe they’ll end up igniting a Cameron craze."
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Julia Alvarez Recommends
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
from Critical Mass (the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors):
"Billed as a young adult book, Peter Cameron's SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU is a wonderful little gem of a book--funny, smart, and totally engaging. A sort of 21st century CATCHER IN THE RYE. I only picked it up because I'm working on a Y.A. title and so I look for books in the same category that might serve as an inspiration and a challenge. This one is certainly both! Hopefully, its "label" (of Y.A.) won't keep it only in the hands of librarians and teens. It deserves a wider readership."
Julia Alvarez was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist for In the Time of the Butterflies. Her latest books include Saving the World and Once Upon a Quinceanera.
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Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
Amazon.com
Horn Books
all select
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
as one of the
BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"With its off-balance marriage of the hilarious and the tragic, Cameron's YA debut holds readers in the grip of its narrator, a desperately alienated, hyper-articulate 18-year-old Manhattanite." -- Publishers Weekly
“'I only feel like myself when I am alone,' says James, and Cameron draws his heartbreaking isolation with empathy and acuteness. The book’s first-person depiction of a privileged but disaffected young protagonist at sea in affluent Manhattan makes it seem very much an “old school” YA novel, but it has an unmistakably contemporary sensibility and respect for teen readers." -- Horn Book Fanfare
Deirdre Baker reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in The Toronto Star
"The promo bumph for Peter Cameron's Someday this Pain Will be Useful to You is all about how it's like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Not altogether, in fact. Although Someday might draw a smaller, more demanding audience than Salinger's novel, it's considerably more sophisticated, subtle and rewarding... This is an outstanding novel."
to read the complete review, click here
Doug Ireland interviews
Peter Cameron for
"Peter Cameron is without question one of the finest contemporary American gay writers - yet his name is hardly a gay household world. If there is justice in this world, that will change with his enthralling new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
It is the story, told in the first person, of James Sveck, a precociously cynical gay kid from Manhattan who has just turned 18. The novel has been compared by critics to the J.D. Salinger classic, Catcher in the Rye - indeed, Cameron's James is the most unforgettable adolescent in American fiction since Holden Caulfield.
Now, with Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, Cameron has created an insightful, captivating, and frequently surprising novel whose youthful gay hero employs sparkling intelligence to grapple with life and love."
To read the complete article, click here
*Publishers Weekly
James Sveck, the 18-year-old protagonist of Cameron's (The City of Your Final Destination) first novel for young adults, is a precocious, lonely and confused Manhattanite who believes he would be happier buying a house in Kansas surrounded by a sleeping porch than entering Brown University as planned and being surrounded by his peers. “I don't like people in general and people my age in particular,” he explains, demonstrating his obsessive concern with language, “and people my age are the ones who go to college…. I'm not a sociopath or a freak (although I don't suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don't enjoy being with people.” He claims people “rarely say anything interesting to each other,” but his own observations are fresh and incisive as he reports on his exchanges at home and at work. As the novel opens, in July 2003, James's cynical older sister is having an affair with a married professor of language theory; his mother ditches her third husband on their Las Vegas honeymoon after he steals her credit cards to gamble; his high-powered father asks if he's gay; and James is stuck working at his mother's art gallery, which has mounted an exhibit by an artist with no name, of garbage cans decoupaged with pages torn out of the Bible, Koran and Torah.
James's elaborate daily entries interlace with a series of flashbacks to gradually reveal the recent panic attack that has landed him in psychotherapy. Descriptions of these sessions offer not only more fodder for James's sardonic critiques of a self-indulgent society, but also an achingly tender portrait of a devastatingly alienated young man. A single reference yields something of an explanation: James saw, at close range, the planes crash into the Twin Towers. The closest he can come to commenting is to turn to a story about a woman whose disappearance after 9/11 went unnoticed for a month: “[It] didn't make me sad. I thought it was beautiful. To die like that… to sink without disturbing the surface of the water.” With its off-balance marriage of the comedic and the deeply painful, its sympathetic embrace of its characters and its hard-won hope, this smart and elegantly written novel merits a wide readership.
*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.
*Booklist
Though he’s been accepted by Brown, 18-year-old James isn’t sure he wants to go to college. What he really wants is to buy a nice house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest—Indiana, perhaps. In the meantime, however, he has a dull, make-work job at his thrice-married mother’s Manhattan art gallery, where he finds himself attracted to her assistant, an older man named John. In a clumsy attempt to capture John’s attention, James winds up accused of sexual harassment! A critically acclaimed author of adult fiction, Cameron makes a singularly auspicious entry into the world of YA with this beautifully conceived and written coming of age novel that is, at turns, funny, sad, tender, and sophisticated. James makes a memorable protagonist, touching in his inability to connect with the world but always entertaining in his first person account of his New York environment, his fractured family, his disastrous trip to the nation’s capital, and his ongoing bouts with psychoanalysis. In the process he dramatizes the ambivalences and uncertainties of adolescence in ways that both teen and adult readers will savor and remember.
THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION
“Think of the exuberant stasis-shattering of Captain Shotover in SHAW'S Heartbreak House. As for style...think of MURIEL SPARK.” (NY Times)
"Cameron's immense narrative drive suggests that the 21st century may have found its very own HENRY JAMES." (The Times, London)
“ELIZABETH BISHOP...[with] her reticence and her incredible eye for detail, must have been a guiding presence in the writing of Cameron’s book. Like BISHOP, Cameron never gives too much away at once, preferring to watch his subjects closely and carefully, rewarding his readers with the steady authenticity of every observation made along the way.” (Time Out New York)
“The novel has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of SHAKESPEARE'S late plays. Indeed, the whole shift of the novel reminds me of the late comedies.” (The London Times)
Peter Cameron’s novel possesses all the intriguing and playful elements of a BORGES fiction.” (Daily Telegraph)
Noel Coward
“A cross between a West End Edwardian play and a MERCHANT-IVORY production.” (Los Angeles Times)
“Has the lightness and airiness of SHAKESPEARE'S A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (Raleigh News & Observer)
“As with JANE AUSTEN, who would appear to be a big influence, there is a great deal that can be seen through the focused prism of love.” (TLS)
“This theatricality, a touch of RATTINGANor WILDE, rather suits the peculiar menage.” (NYTBR)
“HENRY JAMES would have liked Peter Cameron.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Think A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM via Montivideo.” (USA Today)
"It is like a tale from DICKENS or ISAK DINESEN-- real, but not real, with a touch of HENRY JAMES' love of human relationships as a series of chess maneuvers." (Frontiers)
ANDORRA
“Cameron’s novel is a teasing blend of genres – the modern parables of CAMUS or GIDE, a CHATWIN travel narrative – and an enigmatic literary daydream.” (Creative Loafing, Atlanta)
“A deliciously unsettling mix of social comedy and persecution nightmare (think NOEL COWARD as rewritten by FRANZ KAFKA).” (The Seattle Times)
Franz Kafka
“Cameron nods to his predecessors – PROUST, AUSTEN, ROSE MACAULAYand TENNESSEE WILLIAMS – while whipping up a wholly original concoction.” (Raleigh News & Observer)
“A romp through human perception and imagination in the same rich vein as, and with equal skill to, past masters VIRGINIA WOOLF and HENRY JAMES.” (San Antonio Express-News)
“A writer of remarkable clarity and restraint (his writing is reminiscent of a certain style of emotionally potent British modernism – ELIZABETH TAYLOR say, or even KATHARINE MANSFIELD).” (TLS)
“There is a delicate hint of JOHN FOWLES' The Magus in this book.” (Newsday)
THE WEEKEND
“At its best moments, The Weekend echoes VIRGINIA WOOLF, E. M. FORSTER, D. H. LAWRENCEand F. SCOTT FITZGERALD.” (NYTBR)
E. M. Forster
“Cameron is shaping up to be an E. M. FORSTER with his novels – that is, he provides well-worked-out plots involving affluent characters with a variety of sexualities.” (MetroSource)
“With its literary framing device, its redolence of KAFKA and BUZATI and NABOKOV, and its alluringly revealed intricacies, Andorra is the very book I would trade for in the Andorran Biblioteca.” (Washington Post)
“It is a playful literary explanation that places Andorra on the same map with NABOKOV and BORGES.” (Boston Sunday Globe)
 “Like the late British novelist BARBARA PYM, Peter Cameron has the rare ability to take an ordinary event and invest it with heart and significance.” (Los Angeles Times)
“The Weekend is infused with irony, grace, and NOEL COWARD-like sensibility.” (Elle) “The Weekend seems to inhabit the same graceful and leisurely space as a HENRY JAMES or EDITH WHARTON novel.” (Gay Community News)
“A playful phrase of MILAN KUNDERA'S, ‘the textbook of existential mathematics,’ can be applied to . . . his superb novella, The Weekend, because the work is so rich that it seems to touch on every facet of existence. Like the Czech master’s fanciful textbook, Cameron’s books have the power to describe the conditions of human existence with the elegance and precision normally expressed in mathematical equations.” (Lambda Book Report)
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