A Cruel Gift

I do not intend for this blog to degenerate into a collection of book and movie reviews. Occasionally, however, I run into books and movies that move me and that I feel are worth discussing. This week and last have been such occasions.

I remember the summer before I started college. It was a normal summer in many respects, but also felt surreal. As I looked ahead, my summer seemed destined, unlike earlier summers, to end abruptly in a massive wall of dense fog. On the other side of the wall, I knew, would be a move to California, palm trees, the university, dorm life, roommates, a future existence unlike anything I could imagine. Besides being opaque, moreover, the wall marked a frightening transition, a definitive line between being a kid and being an adult.

I was eager and excited. But I was also scared to death.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron, is the first-person account of James Sveck, a very smart, very literate, very funny, and very ironic 18-year-old boy from New York City. In September, James will head off to Brown University, an Ivy League school in Rhode Island. Or will he? James is not simply nervous about growing up, about going off by himself to a new life at a university. The prospect actually terrifies him, although he tells himself (and us) that he just can't bear to spend four years with the kind of kids his age who he imagines attend Brown. He is so terrified, in fact, that he has secretly resolved not to go, to move instead to some small town in the Midwest, and to spend four years, in solitide, educating himself by reading books. All the novels of Anthony Trollope, for example. Proust, perhaps. And poetry by obscure poets.

This book is being displayed in the Young Adult section of bookstores, for reasons that escape me. It is no more a book merely for teens than was Catcher in the Rye, to which it is being compared in reviews. James's sardonic sense of humor, his obsessive love for language together with his precocious ability to use and shape it, his fear of change and of adulthood, his desire for solitude, his reluctance to discuss his feelings with others, his distaste for other kids his own age -- if we strip away his veneer of New York sophistication, what's left reminds me of myself at 18, as it will many others of all ages who have successfully, if perhaps painfully, passed through that wall of fog and moved beyond.

The book contains two excruciating set pieces that reveal much about James. In one, suffering a probable panic attack, he flees a national high school leadership conference he was attending in Washington, D.C., and spends the remaining days of the trip by himself. He checks into a hotel with his mother's credit card, and hangs out in the National Gallery of Art (his mom is the proprietor of a small, rather absurd Chelsea art gallery back in Manhattan). While at the conference, he had repulsed every friendly overture by other students:

And then I realized she was really being nice. She was sincerely being nice. She was misguided, but she was being nice. But she didn't know what she was saying, she was saying come sit at our table as if that was something I could do. As if I could get up and sit down at her table and become a person sitting at her table. As if becoming a person sitting at her table only involved getting up and walking down a platform and sitting at her table.

"No, thank you," I said. "I'm fine alone."

In the other scene, he describes in great detail to his psychiatrist four paintings he had loved as an eighth grader, paintings that meant so much to him that he had bought prints of them with his own money, framed them and hung then in his room. The paintings represented the four stages of life. He had gradually come to realize, as he gazed at them, how much he wanted to skip the "adult" painting and move directly from adolescence to old age and death. (And then one day, a school friend visited his room and called the prints "stupid and faggy." Mortified, he took them down and threw them away.)

When his father, a large-firm lawyer, warns him that he couldn't avoid things just because they made him unhappy, he responds that his father doesn't understand. He's not just unhappy in the way his father imagines him to be unhappy. He is unhappy like he wants to die. His father "didn't say anything else after that, he just patted my leg and went to the bar car and bought three of those little bottles of Johnnie Walker."

Now, James may well have a diagnosable personality disorder. But we sense as we read the book that personality disorders are merely exaggerations of the odd but "normal" traits and feelings that many of us share. Nevertheless, the devastating loneliness and fear of human contact that James's words and actions gradually reveal, emotions poorly concealed beneath his superficial sarcasm and disdain for others, will break your heart.

James is the kind of kid whose second grade teacher wrote that he tended to be "too clever for his own good." That's a judgment that his own rather detached, divorced parents, and his patronizing older sister, still appear to hold. (His peers, more bluntly, simply consider him a "misfit.") James recalls how, when he was a child, his mother would tell his sister: "Just ignore him. All he wants is attention." Wasn't it cruel, he wonders, to deny attention to a small child, when he so obviously and desperately needed it?

In harmony with the finest New York City traditions, James spends a considerable amount of the book matching wits -- in some very funny scenes, and in one scene that is quite moving -- with a rather bumbling psychiatrist his family has encouraged him to visit. He gains far greater insights from his beloved grandmother, a former actress who offers him non-judgmental attention along with hot meals. It is she who offers him the most encouraging -- and most perceptively true -- advice that he receives throughout the entire book:

People who have had only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but, well -- it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is not to 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.

As my angst-ridden freshman dormmates would put the question in the course of midnight bull sessions, "Is it better to be happy and dumb, or brilliant and miserable?" James's grandmother assures him (and us) that risking misery beats doing nothing. We learn only from experience how we should spend our lives, and how we shouldn't. James had dismissed similar thoughts from his father. But he assures his more tactful grandmother the next morning, "You gave me a lot of good advice."

In the last chapter, he recalls a prefiguring childhood experience at his grandmother's house. His grandmother had casually suggested that he move from where he was sitting to a more comfortable location. Shortly after, a glass window pane unpredictably collapsed onto his original seat. They laughed at the time.

I don't know if the falling glass would have killed me -- probably not -- but I realized, in retrospect, that my grandmother had saved me, if not from death, then from terrible injury.

The book has no happy ending. Or even, really, an ending. Endings, happy or otherwise, are for Hollywood movies. Learning to live one's life is incremental, not the result of a blazing epiphany. James tells us he does go on to Brown in September. He does feel miserable his first semester. We suspect, we see hints, that his life later improves. But the book ends.

James's life, like all our lives, is a work in progress. We've been privileged to peer into it for a few months while James was 18.