peter cameron someday this pain will be useful

(Cameron includes a superb line about the uselessness of argument: “My mother was right, but that didn’t change the way I felt about things. The book serves one of the traditional roles of fiction: you want to take it out to settle disputes. Throughout, there’s great stuff on the condiments of modern urban life: high-rise law firms (his father’s profession), art (his mother’s), cosmetic surgery, jobs (“If everyone had to believe in the work he did, not much would get done in the world”), dogs, real estate, therapy. is all Cameron gives us in the way of plot. The story of these two seasons - will James ever unpack in his dorm, what exactly went down in D.C. He’s gotten into Brown, but can’t decide whether to go at the end of the summer something awful happened on a student-group tour through Washington that spring. James Sveck, the Manhattan-bred 18-year-old narrator, doesn’t connect with anyone. It’s as if Cameron had taken the tools earned over a whole career and applied them to the materials of a first book. just let everything go, turned the net of myself inside out and let all the worried desperate fish swim away”).

He offers dry-ice observations (“My grandmother is a firm believer in proper deportment it is the closest she comes to any sort of religion”), memorable weather (“The sky went dark in a weird green swampy way that gave me a creepy end-of-the-world feeling”), and emotions I didn’t believe had descriptions (“I. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength. But he has at last published a book with a terrific title: “Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.” And it’s also his best work - it’s terrific, piercing and funny. The books that followed had hushed, market-resistant titles: “One Way or Another” “Leap Year” “The Weekend.” Cameron’s career seemed to be stuck the quiet thing he liked to do had been shouted down by the culture. (Here’s the conclusion to one story, “Homework”: “Find the value of n such that n plus everything else in your life makes you feel all right. The odd sadness his young characters were prone to was something I’d never seen before. What Cameron showed in the mid-1980s, his work appearing regularly in The New Yorker, was that stories could be assembled from moods. game tapes: they demonstrate what types of plays can be successfully run. For readers who want to be writers, books are N.F.L. I grew up reading Peter Cameron he made me want to write.

Peter cameron someday this pain will be useful