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37 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The Adult World. . . As Socially Perilous As the Kingdom Of Childhood", September 19, 2007
In Peter Cameron's new novel eighteen-year-old James Sveck is on the brink of adulthood and frightened silly. And why wouldn't he be? His mother at 53 has just married her third husband and left him after a few days of a honeymoon in Las Vegas when he "borrowed" her credit cards and ran up a bill by slipping away from her bed and paying to be entertained by lap dancers. His father left his mother for a younger woman who died of cancer before he could marry her. His sarcastic-riddled sister Gillian opines that to mispronounce a child's name-- as she claims her parents have always done to her-- amounts to child abuse. James is brilliant, loves Anthony Trollope, despises for the most part people his own age, has never had either a boyfriend or a girlfriend-- both his parents question his sexual orientation-- has been accepted by Brown Univerity but thinks he wants to buy real estate in the Midwest, Nebraska or maybe Kansas, and live alone. He likes essentially two people on earth John who works in his mother's art gallery, and his grandmother because he finds them both smart and funny. Although the writing is uneven, parts of this short novel are quite funny, at other times very sad; and Mr. Cameron's paints beautifully through the eyes of James a picture of the babbittry of life in the U. S. at the beginning of the new century. By far the best part of the novel is the section when James, by writing a winning essay in high school, wins a trip to Washington, D. C., along with two other students from each state, for a week-long seminar, The American Classroom. There he rides a school bus for the first time, eats at a Red Lobster, an Olive Garden, stays in a TraveLodge and sleeps three to a room with one young man who has never heard of Tennessee Williams. He also meets a young woman on the trip who gushes that this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her, "but she was from North Dakota so it made some sense." Mr. Cameron's satire of the pretentiousness of the art world is quite wonderful. The most important artist in James' mother's gallery is one who will neither let his name be used nor allow a catalogue for his work. "The work should speak for itself." In this instance the work consists of garbage cans "decoupaged with pages torn out of varied editions of the Bible, the Torah or the Koran (for $16,000)." All of us have been there. It reminded me for all the world of "art" I saw in a local gallery several years ago. Grocery carts had been equipped with motors so that they went pell-mell around the floor bumping into other carts. Many of the viewers oohed and aahed over the art they were belolding. For those of us who have never seen ourselves as "sharks," like the car salesman that James and his father encounter, sometimes this young man's comments and perception come close to home: for example, his always trying to get to a table first when he will be seated with a group of strangers and have to make small talk with them or his being uncomfortable and resentful when people on a subway stand "when you are seated. It's like they are standing up just to make you feel bad." Or when he sees a group of women on the train, "a gaggle of Bronxville soccer moms," and figures out that the adult world is just as scary as the kingdom of childhood. Finally James' grandmother, his greatest supporter and ally-- but that's what grandparents are for after all-- reminds him that having bad experiences sometimes helps if you don't let them defeat you. Good advice indeed. Both this novel and James Sveck will grow on you. One could do worse than have a child or brother or boyfriend like him.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Precocious Cynicism Coming of Age, October 15, 2007
What a wonderful coming-of-age novel in the Age of Cynicism. Cameron is in total control of his narrative and precociously cynical protagonist, with all the apt props that drive us into questioning everything. The novel is crisply written, humorous throughout, adroitly crafted, endearing, while suitably alienated by all the phony characters who presumptively "got real and cool" and haven't. This novel is one perfectly suited to its time and age. I wish such great stories were written 40 and 50 years ago, that could be enjoyed in high school, college, and maturity. Granted, Cameron's ability to capture the precocious cynicism only works in our present state of affairs, but no author has captured its intensity with sarcastic irony better. One's empathy and/or identity flows with each defective character (with a mild smirk that we gay men tend to get, when others think they know us better than we already know ourselves -- until, of course, we trust experience to break those barriers). I especially enjoyed the young guy and grandmother's role in the novel's heuristics. In a culture where everyone is born-again or in therapy for being lifeless and self-consciously dead, perhaps we'll discover it is the spirit that questions and doubts, who questions orthodoxy, rather than submits to a depraved civilization in therapy for loss of feeling and meaning, perhaps some of us are shamans -- if only for ourselves. At least that was once, and may yet again, be the hope of youth -- to question things that jaded middle age seems content with. No idealism. Just a precocious kid with doubts about "their" way of the world.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SUPERB, June 25, 2008
This deceptively slim novel has no significant bells and whistles, and its plot, what there is of it, is ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. But oh how it will take your breath away. This book has the sting of truth in every sentence, and I devoured it in less than 2 days - I read it with more gusto than anything I've read in the last few years. The writing is actually dazzling, and you will remember with an ache these delightfully dysfunctional people, so carefully rendered, so beautifully observed.
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