someday this pain will be useful to you

Peter Cameron's excellent modern version of The Catcher in the Rye, called someday this pain will be useful to you, is one of those cross-over books that everyone keeps chasing (Twilight, Hunger Games...). I assume the lower case letters of the title are both to appeal to The Youth and also indicative of how the protagonist James Sveck, feels about himself. The title comes from the motto of a camp where James once spent a couple of ill-advised weeks. Riveted myself, I kept trying to picture the high school student who would enjoy this story of a hyper-verbally precocious 18 year old, trying to sort his way in the world.

James Sveck's life is not one of deprivation--his divorced parents obviously both have plenty of money, even for NYC living--but the angst is real. There is nothing particularly unusual that has led James to his indecision about looming college and future life, and I was grateful that Cameron did not tie all of his protagonist's problems to 9/11, in spite of the location and age of the character. We are led to believe that the event has marked James, given that his school faced the destruction, but even he refuses to be defined by it and is irritated that everyone feels they own the event, the location, or even the date. He's particularly resistant when his therapist tries to draw him out:

"Well," she said, "how would you like to refer to September 11?"

"I'd prefer not to refer to it."

"Why is that?"

"It seems unfair that I have to explain why I don't want to refer to something you brought up that I have just said I don't want to refer to."

This verbal jousting is par for the course for James, throughout the book, whether with his father, who thinks he isn't manly to have ordered salad for lunch; with his older sister who has decided to change the pronunciation of her name because her family's pronunciation of it is "a subtle and insidious form of child abuse."; or with his mother, just back from a failed attempt at a new marriage in the city she hates most in the world: Las Vegas. She had claimed it would be "fun," but as James observes,

Whenever my mother said anything was, or would be, "fun" you could take it as a warning that said thing was not nor would be at all fun, and when I remind my mother of this--I use the example of her telling me that the sailing camp she had forced me to attend the summer I was twelve would be "fun"--she admitted that sailing camp had not been fun for me but that was no reason why a honeymoon in Las Vegas would not be fun for her. Such is the ability adults--well, my mother, at least--have to deceive themselves.

And yet, his mother returns to New York, early and unmarried.

James' best sparring partner is his beloved grandmother who encourages and advises him in life and love, although not in an annoying or cloying way, but simply by accepting his rather old-fashioned ideas of the good life. For example, James wants to buy an arts and crafts style house in the middle of the country somewhere. Obviously, this sets him off from his peers (who are non-existent in this summer-before-college setting), nor does it particularly bring him closer to his unrequited crush on the man who runs his mother's art gallery. This crush and James' attempt to connect with another human being whom he thinks means the world to him, leads to sad and painful grown-up lessons. Still, this is a YA novel, not a study in existentialism. James will survive intact and grow stronger. As his grandmother puts it: "Having bad experiences sometimes helps; it makes it clearer what it is you should be doing...the difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You mustn't let them defeat you, You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."

This book is much funnier than The Catcher in the Rye ever tried to be, and therefore perhaps better-suited to our times. James Sveck is likable and not prone to sarcasm or heavy-handed irony. He'd simply like everyone to speak correctly, say what they mean, and let him buy a house in Ohio if that's what he decides he wants.