I have a soft spot for novels about adolescent ennui. Not that I was a particularly disaffected teenager. Quite the contrary. But I am sometimes a disaffected adult, so I still easily relate to this genre of fiction. Last year, I reread Catcher in the Rye and enjoyed it more than I did when I first read it in high school.
All this is a prelude to a recommendation. My wife (who reads about twenty times as much fiction as I do) recently suggested that I read a short novel called
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. And she was right: It is indeed very good, so I am passing along the suggestion.