This is the only book I had to read in high school that I hated. Usually I could find something to enjoy in all the books we read, but I hated this book. I'm not exactly sure why but to this day I get a shudder down my spine when I see a copy.

this book devastated me.

i read it in high school, like most people. it was the year with all the "classics" that everyone has read at some point in schooling, all depicting young adults in various stages of angst or 19th century high drama or epic poems. whatever.

but this book gave me such a strong physical reaction - i sobbed and felt ill through so much of this story. i think i related too much with the characters for my own good, and the psychological slap-around of the evil in every person was a little hard to handle. all the jealousy and rivalry and the nasty toe gunk of human nature gets shoved down your throat like a horse pill. i saw a lot of myself in gene, and i was desperately in love with finny, or more specifically the idea of him. all my emotions were bigger and more innocent then, and i was torn to pieces.

the passages about revolting against the adult schema rocked my world. i can't remember them specifically anymore, but i just remember underlining and re-reading and re-reading through all the tears. i tried to pick up this book recently, when i found it in a stack of my high school material, but i just couldn't read it again. i think i would rather have the tragically strong memories of this book not be clouded by my older and better judgement.

oh god. with the pool? and breaking that record! oh, and leper with the going crazy in the army! and the tree. and the staircase. oh, i'm feeling ill all over again.

I struggled between 3 and 4 stars on this one.

First, not only had I never read this in school, I never heard of it or its author! Go figure! But I can't IMAGINE requiring a teenager to read and analyze this book. Even though it's a coming-of-age story, this book takes some years under your belt to "get".

I'm completely impressed with the writing. Beautiful sentences with no words wasted. Hemingwayesque in its brevity. I could picture the entire campus and surrounding fields and forests of New Hampshire. The dialogue was clever and seemed authentic.

Yet I found myself sort of disinterested in reading it, even with all this quality writing, and in addition to being a nice 200 pages. I'm starting to think I don't really care for coming-of-age stories. Also, I guess I'm going to play the gender card here, but I've always thought teenage boys were so "weird" with all their strange wrestling, fake fighting, hazing, and contests! I was getting tired of reading about their boarding school shenanigans. Girls would never even consider that stupid tree obsession. Dumb. Yet I know the author was describing something very real for boys. I have a brother, and cousins, and a husband, so I get it. But even when I look at my 6th grade boy students in my classroom I always think, what the hell? Ha!! So a bit tiresome for me.

I also couldn't relate to their friendship. That kind where you're jealous of your friend. I guess that's what it was? I don't want to say much about the pivotal scene, but I'm afraid I never understood the truth of what happened. And I think I was supposed to!

That being said, I still was amazed that the author held me in an incredible state of tension, almost from the first page. Knowles set a palpable tone of FOREBODING until the end. I didn't want to feel that way, but I was impressed that I did.

A real mixed bag for me.

Every summer, I reread a classic from my past. This is my choice for 2013.

Oh, A Separate Peace, how do I hate thee...I haven't got all day to count the ways.

Consider this my revenge, you vile author with your putrid minions (english teachers), for foisting this sack of sentimental shit on my young brain. I hated as a kid and I still hate it now. If John Knowles isn't dead yet, we should get together an unruly mob, some pitchforks, some torches, and slay the monster.

Knowles is the ultimate misanthrope--he hates people, kids in particular, so much that he wrote this novel and bribed the people who determine what is read in school just to torment us. Is there anything as wicked? Anything so utterly evil as this? Well, yes, there is, in this world filled with suffering and injustice, but this book is pretty bad.

یادمه وقتی این کتاب رو توی لیست خوندنم گذاشتم برای این بود که جایی خونده بودم شبیه ناتور دشته. شما مثل من گول نخورید. اصلا شبیه نیست. بیشتر شبیه ترکیبی از انجمن شاعران مرده‌اس، با شخصیت‌هایی که من اصلا باهاشون ارتباط برقرار نمی‌کردم و نمی‌تونستم دوستشون داشته باشم.

Twenty-five years ago, my best friend in high school handed me this book and told me "you must read this." I did, for the first time, this week. I think it has fallen out of popularity as required reading in high school, possibly due to its New England boarding school setting, or its WWII time period or its characters only consisting of white, affluent males.

However, despite some of today's youth being out of touch with some or all of these things, they are absolutely in touch with the central theme: adolescence. This novel has a simple setting, a basic plot, few characters and limited dialogue. Yet, it is quite brilliant. The writer in me applauded. I don't know if I've ever been more startled by a protagonist as I was while reading this novel, or more appreciative in how much is said in fewer than 200 pages. Hardly a word is wasted. As corny as this may sound, I wanted to shake the author's hand and say "thank you for making me think and feel and for not wasting my time." Bravo.

It is entirely possible that, were I to reread this today, it wouldn't rise to the lofty height at which it hazily soars within the literary shrine of my memory. But back in the day I thought that Knowles had crafted a powerhouse story that punched a number of those buttons—including that of the precariousness of forming and framing an image of oneself in relation to another—dialed directly into the heart and soul of a teenage boy, especially one with the experience of itinerancy and thus an acute sensitivity to the cleavability of friendship.

As it is, I am going to wax Sastreatic upon the enduring popularity of A Separate Peace, which can perhaps be attributed principally to the manner in which Knowles marries an emotionally tautened and harrowing portrayal of the tempestuous inner turmoils of adolescent souls compressed into close quarters, their innate rivalries and companionships and immersions into spontaneously-sprung personal proving grounds, with a more age-unspecific delineation of the perilously paranoid mental realm of the intellectual as set in perceived opposition against a competition endowed with gifts of a purely material and/or spiritual nature—mind against body when the latter includes its atomized ideation—and an allegorical updating of the sacrificial self-deicide that forms the locus from which the Christian religions are derived. Gene's momentary generation of kinetic waves, which results in Phineas' immediate, limb-shattering fall and consequent stair-struck death, occurs in an instantaneous alliance between the rational and irrational forces of his mind—the id and ego coming to agreement in a mutual determination to cleanse a determined enemy when the opportunity fortuitously presents itself. Unless it didn't, at which point the Satanic allegiance of that very last pairing is limned starker in an infernal hall of mirrors.

In the aftermath Knowles presents the reader with three branchings of flowering and potentiality-laden guilt: that of a young man who has grievously hurt a true friend from the basest of motives and most uncharitable of misperceptions; that of a prodigious intelligence becoming starkly cognizant of all the dangers immanent within the razored edges of an unsheathed intellect; and that of a soul, burdened by the dread weight and occluding shadows of existential gravity, given a means of lightening both load and path ahead through the self-reflection engendered by an innocent being's sacrifice—a sense of one's temporal placement born of an absence whose voided nature imparts that very sensational awareness. But these layered revelations would not suffice were it not for the story that Knowles crafted to address them; and this mid-century portrayal of teenage conflict and conflicted states, enacted within a world aflame with its own brutally metastasized, war-wrought projection of the same, is shaped to perfection. Moving, absorbing, thoughtful, cathartic, all within a tightly-measured fictive framework: this is why A Separate Peace has achieved the status of an American classic.

Since we have this new war in Ukraine to occupy our attention, I have been thinking of books I’ve read that speak to man’s need to kill each other, that aggressive, violent trait, and I recalled reading A Separate Peace in high school, as most people did in the USA in the sixties, as required school reading, in part because it was a coming-of-age book. There was a growing recognition in the mid- to late-sixties (the Student Revolution on college campuses was part of this movement) that books that spoke directly to adolescents might increase reading fluency and engagement, and there were few of these books to offer young people in those early days of YAL. This novel was published in 1959 and is a kind of a coming-of-age gem.

John Knowles was a 1945 graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, a prestigious East coast boys’ prep school, so he wrote a novel and called Exeter Devon in part based on his experiences there, including his own broken leg from a fall from a tree. I call this a war novel now because, though it takes place in a sheltered and privileged location it takes place as many young men (and so many others) were dying in WWII.

As happens in the US, the great geographical distance from Europe, Korea, Viet Nam, and so on make it difficult for homelanders to fully understand the nature of the day-to-day experience young people (i.e., soldiers) have of war. Also, it can take young people a long time to feel as if they are part of the global community, of course; as Gene says,

“I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”

The key moment in the book happens in a tree; a place of macho challenges: Who will climb it and jump into the river? Only the bravest, of course. This moment--and it does just take a moment or so--happens between best friends Phineas and Gene, but invites some questions: Did Finny fall (and break his leg) or was he the victim of a moment of aggression by Gene? The shy intellectual Gene adores the confident, athletic Finny, and there are some strong homo-erotic indications in narrator Gene’s descriptions of him, though these tendencies are never named as homosexual (in part, I take it, because it was a 1959 publication; I am sure we never discussed in class the possibility of the boys being gay). Some (possible) desires, some frictions, and some ambivalence drive their relationship. Do all of these roiling emotions lead to a so-small and yet so-large moment of violence?

Gene says, about his desire to be Finny: "I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”

Much of the novel tries to unravel the mystery of that moment even as older boys head out to Europe to fight the Fuhrer, encouraged by patriotic fervor and naivete and patriotism. No one anticipates what happens to sweet and simple naturalist student Lepellier (also known as Leper), who is discharged from the army after a nervous breakdown from what he has seen in combat--amputated limbs, bloody massacres. When Gene goes to visit Leper, in recovery at home, Gene can’t process what Leper is going through; he yells at Leper and tells him to shut up, to stop telling him what he has experienced:

“I don’t care what happened to you! It has nothing to do with me!”

But it does have something to do with him, and he knows it:

"Fear seized my stomach like a cramp. I didn’t care what I said to him now; it was myself I was worried about. For if Leper was psycho it was the army which had done it to him, and I and all of us were on the brink of the army."

Leper asks a key question no patriotic citizen who had not served in the military would have or could have asked at the time:

“Am I crazy? Or is the army crazy? I couldn’t sleep at night and could only sleep when I wasn’t in my bed; everything was mixed up, turned upside down.”

Still, all these other boys who have not yet enlisted, all these boys still in school at Devon, who are cut off from the reality of war, are not cut off from the darker aspects of their human natures-anger, jealousy, love--as they interact with each other, and grow from boys into men in their privileged--”high IQs and expensive shoes”--Devon private boys school.

“. . . there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.”

Eventually Gene begins to see:

“It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

Ultimately this is a growing-up story, and a good one:

“I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.”

And it’s about war and peace:

“. . . it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.”

Ugh. I had heard my friends from high school talk about how much they hated this book when they had to read it and thought perhaps hadn't been able to appreciate it as required reading. Turns out, it's just an awful book. Sympathy for the characters = 0. I kept turning pages against my will because a) I thought that there had to be SOMETHING redeeming about it (there's not) and b) because I was teaching it to 8th graders.

Besides the shoddy writing and boring plot/characters, the part that killed me was how Finny supposedly dies (some bone marrow from his broken leg gets into his blood stream then to his heart). This can't even HAPPEN. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

I'm going to give this book three stars because I enjoyed the author's style and I thought the character of Phineas was extremely well done. Overall it is a book which makes the reader think and try to understand the intent of each boy's actions. However I was extremely uncomfortable with Gene as the narrator. I felt I could not believe his views, either because he was trying to present himself in the best light, or because he was too immature to understand the motives of other people and thus misled himself. I also never believed he was sorry for his actions except insofar as they affected him personally. Throughout the book I longed for another character to take over the narration so we could at least have two versions of events to decide between. So although I liked the book I never felt quite satisfied with it.

I recently re-read this book for the AP class that I'm teaching and I was reminded of what a deceptively simple book this appears to be on the surface. Set in Devon (an all boys prep school) during WWII, A Separate Peace explores how the encroaching reality of war affects the psychological and social development of all the boys attending the school. The poignant irony of providing these young men with a classics based education at a prestigious school just to be sent into war to kill and be killed effectively shows how, before they even make it to the battlefield, the war cripples them--for one physically, for the others psychologically. The book focuses on the relationship between Finny, the popular and perfect athlete, and Gene, the intelligent and dangerously introspective one. Gene's all-consuming envy toward Finny causes him to shake the tree limb both are standing on; Finny falls to the ground and breaks his leg. The event serves as a metaphor for how Gene's betrayal of the friendship has broken Finny.

Effective use is made of Finny as a Christ figure and we witness as Gene grows psychologically in response to the realization that he has destroyed not just Finny's athletic career, but also Finny's essence. Gene comes to understand that the real enemy is the enemy within and, through Finny, Gene finds a form of salvation from his dark, neurotic tendencies.

Knowles does so much with setting and imagery in the book that I pick up on something new every time I read it. Wonderful novel.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder