Peter Cameron: "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You"

“Tell one part of your problem.” This is one of the moments in “Someday” that I love most. James is sitting with his grandmother, Nanette, “the poor man’s Kitty Carlisle Hart.” Since James can’t articulate what occurred at work, Nanette suggests that he pick one corner of the problem, and focus on that.

Writers everywhere know this is the right approach. It’s the entire thesis of Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird.” It’s also Curtis Sittenfeld’s advice for trying times: Just attempt to do 500 words per day.

The side entry. When I think of Cameron’s approach to 9/11, I think of front and side doors. Many writers chose to address 9/11 head-on: For example, there was Jonathan Safran Foer’s clumsy image of a man “falling up.” There was Susan Sontag in “The New Yorker”—opining awkwardly about courage. There was “United 93.”

Cameron chooses, instead, to write from the point of view of a teenager who seems to have lost no one in the catastrophe. And yet he has been forced to view the falling of both Towers; he is a student at Stuyvesant.

The way James dances around 9/11 seems exactly right to me. You get the sense that it’s too painful to describe in a direct way, and yet it’s also never far from James’s thoughts. I also like his typically skewed thinking on the “victim-who-had-no-family” story; to disappear without a trace seems, to James, perversely elegant and even admirable. (Cameron never tries to make James sympathetic or “smoothed-out” for us; Cameron maintains that James is just as screwed-up, and (paradoxically) quite a bit more likeable than vast, less-reflective swaths of the rest of the world.)

Adolescence is a crucible; you are forming adult habits while clinging to various childish tics. (Lorrie Moore suggests that, in your adulthood, your past is “buried, but buried alive.”) Peter Cameron earned a Lorrie Moore review in “The New York Review of Books” for “Someday”—and it’s curious to me that, when Moore released “A Gate at the Stairs” a few years later (a book that happens to be about an adolescent navigating personal change in a Dubyah-era setting of international turbulence), Moore did not acknowledge a debt to Peter Cameron.

The climax. I especially love that this spiky novel has—as its climax—the answering of a casual phone call. It’s just an offer to go see the (really endless) Vanessa Redgrave production of “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” James won’t take the call—because the interlocutor is a Brown U kid, and James refuses to go to Brown.

But Gillian—who has been so insufferable for so much of the story—understands that James needs to take this call, and she gets him to do so, gently (and, in this moment, she sort of redeems herself). I also love that this decision doesn’t mean James is now fully capable of steering himself through the (often-dreadful and false) social world. James does report that he goes to Brown, and, at least for a term, he is miserable. But: baby steps.

I also love Nanette’s reading of James’s behavior at the Frick: “You had a desire, and you acted on it. Your behavior was stupid, but still, I think the incident is heartening.” Nanette is right, and John eventually feels the way James/Nanette does. I love that a crisis occurs; it gets mislabeled in the heat of the moment; and, eventually, cooler heads prevail. This feels just like life.

Someone took his time and enjoyed this. James loves to think about Nanette’s house—how it is idiosyncratic and stately. When you look at the house, you sense the pleasure the designer had in doing his work. And you feel pleasure, too.

That’s what James is talking about, of course—but, on another level, Peter Cameron is talking directly to the reader. And he is talking about his own novel. “Someday” is like Nanette’s house—quirky and exquisite. Someone took his time here. (You’ll get more from this book than from a Stephen King novel.) It seems to me Cameron might also be tipping a hat to Barbara Pym, Barbara Comyns, Elizabeth Taylor, and other artful British novelists he loves.

How do I know what I will want in my life? How do I know what things I will need?  This is a rare novel where the final sentence is every bit as strange and powerful as the first sentence.

First: How many writers have the guts to end their work with a question?

Second: This question is so effective, because it shows that James is both changing and staying the same. He is being his standard maddening self. Of course he won’t need Nanette’s “National Geographic” editions from the 1950s; Mr. Sveck is right to push James on this question. By refusing to listen, James is insisting on being himself (and we love him for it).

At the same time, the question marks a subtle change, because James is now really envisioning a future for himself. It’s maybe a more plausible and functional future than the let’s-plop-down-in-Kentucky-and-read-Trollope future. James is no longer expressing a wish not to exist; there isn’t that my-skin-is-a-burning-building-and-I-need-to-evacuate vibe. Which is a triumph—and it’s not schmaltzy, and it’s not uncomplicated.

And there you have it for today. Cameron has written only one novel since “Someday,” called “Coral Glynn,” and it’s bizarre, and, again, I like it. This is a man who takes his time.