Peter Cameron at Three Lives

Last night Peter Cameron read from his new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, about a very smart, articulate eighteen year-old gay Manhattanite navigating his final summer before starting at Brown, which he thinks he would rather not attend because "I don't like people in general and people my age in particular,"and "people my age are the ones who go to college." Writing in the New York Review of Books, Lorrie Moore said the novel was "a bravura performance" and "a stunning little book," comparing it to Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and Indecision. A critic for Publishers  Weekly wrote, "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." In the brief Q&A after reading, he denied sharing many of his narrator's traits and said one of the pleasures of aging was better understanding and accepting other people. I asked him if he had always wanted to write a YA novel or if FSG foisted it into that category against his wishes, and he said he had thought he was writing another adult novel but they wanted to sell it to young people. Another ridiculous corporate decision, but the good news for you is that the extremely handsome hardcover is only $16.00. Everyone should buy it and read it.