urbanmennonite.com

Why I picked it up: That’s a great title. Seriously. That may be in the top five best fiction titles ever (at least in my library).  It’s from Ovid.

Lots of people are calling this a coming-of-age story.  Fair enough.  I love coming-of-age stories — good ones that is.  Catcher in the Rye is still read for a reason; it’s a pretty damn classic example of the buildungsroman and it’s unfortunate that all books concerning young men at the brink of adulthood trying to parse some meaning out of their lives has to be compared to it.

But Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is really more than a coming-of-age.  It’s a very New York novel (it couldn’t take place anywhere else — the city informs every sentence) and James, the main character, may only be 18 but he could be some 40-year-olds I know too.  Plus, he’s got a great voice; in real life, I get very annoyed at privileged white kids who are unhappy that they live in fabulous Manhattan apartments and don’t want to go to Brown but for some reason, reading about this one isn’t bad at all.

Basic plot in marketing copy prose: James is adrift in New York the summer before beginning college.  His parents can’t understand him, his sister annoys him, he has no friends, college is meaningless since he doesn’t know what he wants to be and then there’s his annoying therapist to top it off.  Navigating the rocky shores of modern urban adolescence with precise language, love of his grandmother and a strong dislike of his peer group, he is a Holden Caulfield for the 21st century.

But here’s what it’s really about: parents; identity; visibility and the search for love; loss; the infallibility of permanence; distinguishing between what you think you want and what you should want; trying to connect to a world that you don’t understand and that doesn’t understand you; trying to determine what to keep and what to leave behind, and, above all, how to begin to become the person that you want to be.

Random yet representative quote: “I wished that Grand Central Terminal were a station and not a terminal, like Penn Station (although most people incorrectly refer to Grand Central as Grand Central Station), so the train would pass through and continue on to somewhere else, so that I could pass through and continue on to somewhere else, or just continue and never arrive,  never stop.  Spend the rest of my life in transit, safe inside a train, with the impossible unfortunate world hurtling past outside the window.”