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“Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You” by Peter Cameron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 9780374309893, $16.00)
 
Too many books get likened to “The Catcher in the Rye” simply because they deal with the restive emotions of adolescence, but Peter Cameron’s new novel “Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You”—in addition to sporting the single best title ever for a teen novel—truly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as J. D. Salinger’s classic because it reaches a similar depth as it explores the elusive unhappiness of one unsteady young man.
 
James Sveck is a brainy eighteen-year-old New Yorker being pulled slowly into an Ivy League education by the turning tide of August. His mother is a Manhattan art dealer freshly remarried and just as freshly separated from her unworthy new husband. His father is a born-again bachelor fueled by steak and power suits. His sister Gillian (who insists on pronouncing her name with a hard “G”) is dating her married professor. Their collective family life bears on James like a weight that never eases.
 
James regards kids his own age as boring and distasteful, and the idea of going off to college with a few hundred of them alarms and repulses him. He would rather find an old house in a small town and spend four years reading novels by Trollope. The only two people whose company James does enjoy are his suburban grandmother and his cultured older co-worker John, who treats James almost as an equal.
 
Walking through his late-summer days, James tosses off wry, cutting observations of his messed-up family, of life in New York, and of the pretensions of his mother’s art-scene compatriots. But it’s mainly in his sessions with his newly retained psychiatrist that James begins to give hints of his closely guarded inner world: he’s deeply depressed, staggered and stymied by the enormity of the life set before him. He’s battered and unprepared. His perspective on the world is both bitingly funny and also very sad. He’s the Holden Caulfield of the new century, here to remind us that for young people, growing up hasn’t become any easier. He would be a joke if he weren’t so astonishingly engaging.
 
With rich empathy and skillful writing, Peter Cameron does something quite remarkable with James. As a protagonist, he’s complex and particular—he loves old houses, insists on proper grammar, and resists every attempt to simplify or package his elliptic thoughts—yet he’s also appealingly universal. Wrapped inside him are the myriad untamed emotions of late adolescence. With his humor and his hurt, James wins his audience over to his side and makes them root for him.
 
There’s no magic fix for what James—and many a teenager like him—feels. But as his story shows, such turmoil needn’t be a tragedy. By talking out his thoughts and letting himself experience his buried fear and anger and loneliness, James starts putting it behind him; he even grudgingly goes off to college—bolstered, a bit, by his grandmother’s assurance that even bad experiences can be helpful to you as long you don’t let them defeat you.
 
“Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You” is a wise, classy, well-written novel that goes right to the heart of the teenage predicament. It will have special appeal to readers fond of books like Ned Vizzini’s “Be More Chill” and Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” but its true equals are the nearly peerless recent books “Looking for Alaska” by John Green and “Story of a Girl” by Sara Zarr. Then, of course, there’s always Salinger, and he's pretty good company.
 
Highly recommended for teens and adults.
 
Review by Mark David Bradshaw, September 26, 2007
 

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