Review: Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Cameron, Peter. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. Frances Foster Books / Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007.

Cameron’s first novel for teen readers joins the long tradition of young adult literature about alienated youth, and it’s one of the most skilfully written. Perhaps it’s because we are so deep inside the main character’s head that we experience the pain and awkwardness of social interactions as he does. Or perhaps it’s the voice, so true to a disaffected youth. Or it might be the author’s ability to build character based on nuance. With James, it’s most often what he doesn’t say, doesn’t think, and doesn’t do that give us insight into who he really is.

At eighteen, James Sveck seems to have everything going for him. He’s bright and witty, from an affluent family living in Manhattan, and he is soon headed to Brown University for his freshman year. He has a summer job in his mother’s art gallery where he doesn’t have to do much more than surf the internet, read, and chat with John, the handsome and capable young gallery manager. Aside from his grandmother, James tells us, John is the only person he’s ever liked. In fact, he’s decided he doesn’t want to attend college in the fall because he’s never cared much for people his age. Instead, he’d like to use his tuition money to buy a house somewhere in the Midwest, so he continually pores over real estate ads, looking for a good bargain.

James is obsessed with what’s on the surface. He’s the kind of person who will make a fuss over a typo on a menu in order to feel superior to the restaurant staff, and it’s nearly impossible to have a conversation with him as he’s continually picking apart word choices. Even his therapy sessions turn into sparring matches about semantics. It’s a defense mechanism he’s built up over the years to avoid looking deeper into himself and others.

Both his mother and his father ask him point-blank at various points in the story if he is gay. James never gives them, or us, a straight answer.

My father glanced at my plate of pasta, but said nothing. He cut into his nearly raw beef and smiled at the blood it drooled. “So,” he said after he had taken a bite,”you’re not going to tell me?”

“Not going to tell you what?”

“Whether or not you’re gay.”

“No,” I said. “Why should I? Did you tell your parents?”

“I wasn’t gay,” said my father. “I was straight.”

“So, what, if you’re gay you have a moral obligation to inform your parents and if you’re straight you don’t?”

“James, I’m just trying to be helpful. I’m just trying to be a good father. You don’t have to get hostile. I just thought you might be gay, and if you were, I wanted to let you know that’s fine, and help you in whatever way I could.”

“Why might you think I was gay?”

“I don’t know. You just seem — well, let’s put it this way: you don’t seem interested in girls. You’re eighteen and as far as I know you’ve never been on a date.”

I said nothing.

“Am I wrong? Or is it true?”

“Just because I’ve never been on a date, doesn’t mean I’m gay. And, besides, no one goes on dates anymore.”

“Well, whatever — normal kids hang out. They go out. Maybe date isn’t the right word. But you know what I mean.”

“You don’t think I’m normal?”

So goes a typical conversation with James Dunfour Sveck.

His one attempt to connect with another human being ends in complete disaster. At the gallery one day, John leaves the browser open on the office computer, and James presses the BACK key several times to see what sites John visited. Among them, he finds a site called Gent4Gents where John has just entered his profile as “Black Narcissus.” James enters a profile of his own, perfectly geared toward the John’s dream man:

30-year-old hunky blond (6′, 190) who worked at the Contemporary Art Department of Sotheby’s, was half-French and half-American (I had a feeling John was a Francophile), had graduated from Stanford and done post-graduate work at the Sorbonne, had two Maine coon cats (”Peretti” and “Bugatti”), loved the Yankees and New York City Ballet, lived in Chelsea and had an 8″ uncut cock.

It’s not long before John responds to James’s fake ad. The two of them carry on an online correspondence for a while, but John wants them to meet in person. Rather than panicking, as most people in James’s situation would do, James shows up — as himself. He’s so naïve and so socially inept that he is surprised by John’s anger when he finds out he has been tricked. James’s mother is furious with him, as well, and she fires him from his job for sexual harassment.

Humiliated by their reactions, James takes the hour-long train trip to visit his grandmother, who offers him more sage advice than his parents or therapists ever could. She tells him that people often act stupidly when it comes to love, but that the important thing is to act. Although readers will probably understand early on that he is attracted to John, it’s the first time we have any hint that James himself has acknowledged his feelings for him.

This beautifully written novel is certainly one of the most literary novels in the field of LGBTQ literature for teens, and it offers an in depth portrait of a questioning teen struggling with many issues on the brink of manhood.