Empowering Bright & Gifted Children

 

Author: Peter Cameron

Interest Level: Upper Grades (9-12)
ATOS Reading Level: 6.0
AR Points: 9.0
Publisher Recommended Age: 14+
Publisher: Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Type: Hardcover
Pages: 240
Note: Mature Content

 

 

It’s time for eighteen-year-old James Sveck to begin his freshman year at Brown. Instead, he’s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary—a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he’s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope—or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch.

 

James’s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James’s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie.

 

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.

 

 

Book Group Guide: Click here for Reading Group Guide for "Someday This Pain Will be Useful To You" by Peter Cameron

 

 

School Library Journal: "(this) young adult novel is a...situational portrait of...a New York loner who dreams of bypassing college and settling down...in the Midwest." Grades 10+

 

Children's Literature: "This brilliant story is perfect for teens who struggle to find themselves—or even just the words to express what they want to say."

 

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review): "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 (Starred Review): "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."

 

The Horn Book (Starred Review): "The dialogue pings...Cameron, a respected author of adult fiction, has written a spare, spacious, quietly dazzling book for teens and former teens."

 

New York Review of Books: "So accomplished is its subtlety that one is not even award 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 cats on the book a sudden, brilliant light."

 

 

Peter Cameron (born 29 November 1959 in Pompton Plains, New Jersey) is an American novelist and writer living in New York, NY. He is best known for his novels Andorra, The Weekend and The City of Your Final Destination.

 

Cameron grew up in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, and in London, England. He spent two years attending the progressive American School in London, where he discovered the joys of reading, and began writing stories, poems, and plays. Cameron graduated from Hamilton College in New York State in 1982 with a B.A. in English literature.

 

Cameron counts among his strongest influences the novels of British women writers such as Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Penelope Mortimer, and Elizabeth Taylor. He admires these writers for their elegant and accomplished use of language and their penetrating and sensitive exploration of personal life. He also admires the writing of the late William Maxwell for its natural elegance and deeply felt humanity. Shirley Hazzard, James Salter, and Denton Welch are also revered.

 

After arriving in New York City in 1982, Cameron worked for a year in the subsidiary rights department of St. Martin’s Press. Upon realizing he did not want to pursue a career in publishing, he began doing administrative work for non-profit organizations. From 1983 to 1988, he worked for the Trust for Public Land, a land-conservation organization, and from 1990 to 1998 he worked for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal organization that protects and extends the civil rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS. In 1987 he taught writing at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and from 1990–1996 he taught in the MFA program at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. From 1998 to 2005 he taught in Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program. He taught at Yale University in the fall of 2005.

 

In March 2005 his first play, A Thing of the Past, was read at Lincoln Center Theater by a cast including Marian Seldes and Estelle Parsons. A new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2007.

 

You can find out more about Peter Cameron at his website, www.peter-cameron.com.