Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

James Sveck is eighteen, freshly graduated, and dreading the fall when he is supposed to leave for Brown. Instead he fantasizes about buying an old house somewhere quiet and living alone, away from the people he cannot seem to connect with. Over one Manhattan summer he works at his mother's art gallery, sees a therapist he resists, and narrates his own growing isolation in a dry, precise voice. The novel stays close inside his head as his family tries to understand what is wrong and James tries to figure out how to want his own future.