peter cameron

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"Several weeks after finishing it, I am still thinking about the book’s erudite, confused hero, James, who’s grappling with his future, his sexuality, his screwed-up family, and his 9/​11-scarred hometown. Cameron, a critically acclaimed adult author, won heaps of raves for this coming-of-age tale and I’m sure it sold fine, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite enough. I can’t get why everyone hasn’t read this book. Though it’s become a cliché to say so, Someday… deserves to join the pantheon of teen misfit-lit classics—right up there with Holden. With a paperback version coming out in April, there’s time to remedy that. Forget the YA label; it’s a book for the ages."

"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.

In Peter Cameron's new novel, his eighth work of fiction, the narrator is a disaffected teenage product of divorced, self-involved, and privileged parents. He is thus so emblematic of a typical upper-middle-class experience today that there is from the outset the potential for cliché, suggesting that Cameron has set himself an admirably difficult task. James Sveck, a Manhattanite, smacks of an updated Holden Caulfield, believing as he does that nearly everyone is a fraud, apart from a young man who runs his mother's art gallery and, touchingly, his grandmother. But Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You -- a work unfairly categorized as "young adult" -- is a keenly observed and elegantly drawn novel that skirts the problems typical of the post-Salinger teenage angst story.

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"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."

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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 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."

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."

"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."

from Critical Mass (the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors):

"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

"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.

"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."

To read the interview, click here.