Wow, I was not expecting to like this book because I had to read it for school, but I surprisingly did. Gene and Finny have the most complicated, beautiful friendship. Phineas,Finny, was my absolute favorite. He cracked me up so many times, and he was just such a complex, imaginative character. He has all of these big ideas/thoughts and almost an innocence about him. While, Gene was such a raw character, and it was so interesting reading about the Devon school through his eyes. I definitely thought Finny used Gene sometimes. I was so sad when Finny died! I almost cried. Finny was my favorite and without him this book wouldn’t be the same.

“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”

I had a lot of conflicts with this book just from the beginning.

On the first several pages, Phineas sounded like an exact Voldemort with his ability to please the others with his rightly chosen words, and later I couldn't get rid of that image in my head.

Second, I couldn't understand Gene, the protagonist, as deeply as I should have, maybe the timing wasn't right for this book, maybe I just missed some things. In any case, I didn't get emotional and related to him.

And of course the main thing - the war. All along the book, I couldn't get rid of the idea how the war was praised in the minds of those boys. It wasn't the main theme of the book, not that apparent, but I could feel it. Naturally, boys love to play battles and wars, as girls love to play being mothers and carrying for their dolls while they are little. But to idealize war when you are about 16, to want to be part of it, without fully realizing what you are getting into, was not convincing for me. At least, the characters couldn't convince me otherwise, I couldn't see their motives.

I know, because I've seen war, I've seen the determination the young soldiers, who decided to enlist voluntarily, hold in their minds, I've seen their motives just by looking at their faces. Those characters didn't have that.

As for the writing, it was very "neat" - short, strict, precise, without any artificial prolongation. However, the perfect prose couldn't show me the deptհ of characters. Pity. It would have been a perfect book.

ೃ⁀➷ gene needs some help. but props to him for being the biggest gas lighter and manipulator

I hadn’t thought of writing a review of this book until I read how many people disliked it. Far from wanting to simply "prove" others were wrong, I began thinking about why others might not like this book and its message. First, it is somewhat legitimate to dislike anything one must read in high school. However, if you never get past that point, life isn't much worth living. If you never come back and read some of the things on your own, you just aren't much of a human being. Rant as one will against the unpleasantness of secondary educational methods, sooner or later, one ought to recognize that explaining value the wrong way isn't a denial of the concept. With that said, I still don't care for the heavy handedness of symbolism in, say, Billy Budd.

Second, I began to think about all the people today who run away from hit and run accidents, ostensibly for selfish reasons, and I tried to see if there was some sort of parallel with issues of honor and accountability and the apparent plethora of irresponsible behavior. While there may be some grain of truth to this, I think this book's message evades the modern mind on still another level.

This book is a bit heavy handed on the imagery also, beginning with a snotty group at a prep school. In a day when rich people appear somewhat vile to some, (perhaps because they must be forced to share their wealth with us,) perhaps a prep school doesn't serve as a good choice setting in which to begin. When I first read this book years ago, I recall feeling so alienated from the setting that I thought that whatever ills happened to anyone at this school, they all deserved it just because they were there. Unfortunately, all that feeling did was make me feel uncomfortably similar to Gene. I thought the Super Suicide Society was a bit silly too, perhaps an anachronism or even doing Hitler’s SS an extra letter for heavy symbolism. It was, at the same time, too juvenile and yet too replete with boyish bravado.

The two main characters are, nevertheless, interesting. I think that Gene is the kind of everyman with a touch more paranoia thrown in, suspecting that everyone must think pretty much like he does, even if it is done in secret. Finny (and how can anyone today admire someone named Phineas?) is the perfect antagonist. He is the one who can flaunt tradition but do so with such an open heart that he is automatically popular. From what I read about about John F. Kennedy, the two seem to have the same charisma, maybe even the same persona. Gene knows that if he tried half of what Finny did, he couldn't pull it off. The rest of us know it about ourselves too. This includes the elitist, Brinker Hadley. The book is worth reading just being able to watch people like Hadley squirm. Yet once again, perhaps we don't see these characterizations much any more in what has unfortunately become a PC society.

Further I thought that the underlying theme of the war doesn't work very well any longer either, perhaps society as a whole becoming so isolated from any concept of the necessity of war, individuals unwilling to sacrifice for any means beyond personal gain. When you are facing an impending great uncertainty, you tend to do things which negate that kind of looming doom, just like these boys did. That’s something which is uncomfortable in itself, but perhaps our era of irresponsibility tends to dissolve our fear by making such things less inevitable.

However the main reason I believe that this book doesn't really carry a strong message to the modern reader is beyond all the things I have yet considered: the difficulty with appreciating this book isn’t an itinerant selfishness, the desire to remain individual rather than a small part of the whole, nor is it about the inability to relate to prep school, inevitable deniability or even the heavy symbolism. I tend to think that the failure to recognize the importance of this book's message is our unwillingness to acknowledge in some very fundamental way, the pain we ultimately incur upon ourselves in life through the necessity of our actions. This book essentially pulls out our dirty laundry which we have hidden away, perhaps something we today brag about being natural and therefore no longer sinful. Perhaps it is our modern inability to acknowledge our living sin as having missed the mark in our daily lives.

I can certainly recall very easily my feeling justified in my actions when younger which purposefully hurt others only to acknowledge silently later that I was so very wrong. As I see it, that is what this book is about, not so much making the mistake, something irretrievably wrong, but learning to deal with the kind of repercussions which follow from our original loathsome behavior. I tend to think that this book might have been better titled, An Odious Wrong, A Separate Peace. Still, even had the author considered this, he knew that it was the conclusion which was the important part, the part which makes one a human being, being able to find a forgiveness of self rather than carrying the weight around forever. It is hard enough to face one’s mistakes.…and clearly this is an uncomfortable process for us, but it is a greater thing to be able to find a peace so that one can continue to not only exist but to live and prosper.

An eternally profound take on war and a cornerstone of the dark academia genre. What a joy to revisit a work that has had such an impact on my literary perspective.

CW/TW: war themes, injury, toxic relationship, death, character death, mental illness, ableism, g-slur, racism, alcohol consumption

This text is a novel that I think is best appreciated by the mature reader.
It is also undeniably a masterpiece!
There are no heroes or villains in this text, merely representations of the many shades of humanity, as personified by the inhabitants of an all boys private academy in New Hampshire in the early 1940s. Through the voice of the novel's narrator (Gene) Mr. Knowles leads the reader through the miasma that is male friendship, and maturation. Love is never 100% without "bad" baggage, and when humans realize that we are good and evil in one body it is the struggle that follows that determines our course in life. "A Separate Peace" is a beautiful and heart rendering depiction of that most important of internal struggles. Its closing lines remind us that it is in how we react to this knowledge that defines our future.
Much praise has been lauded on Mr. Knowles tight control of the novel's style and the praise is well deserved. The book is lyrical at times, and Knowles has a wonderful control of prose. Very rarely in this text does he use more words then are needed. In the current age of overwrought novels, this economic use of words shows the reader just how first-class great writing can be.
The ending of this novel forced me to mourn some of the characters, but is also forced me to mourn for bits of myself. That is not a negative thing, only a natural part of the progression of life. When fiction speaks to such simplistic truths it is a delight.
"A Separate Peace" is a piece of perfection, written about an imperfect entity. Us!

Gene attended an exclusive New Hampshire school. 15 years later he came back to Devon School to seek forgiveness for what he did here while he was a student. In his school days he became friends with Finny, an outstanding athlete. Finny was a favorite of everyone. fellow students used to look up to him as their inspiration and teachers were mighty impressed with this boy for whatever he said prevailed. Gene was a spectacular student academically while Finny's dream was to attend Olympics of 1944. Then one day in accident Finny fell from a tree and broke his legs and with it his Olympic dreams. And the story evolved it was revealed that accident that broke Finny's leg might be intentional.

Once Finny's back in school, things never get back to normal. For one it was WWII and students found themselves to be in difficult situation. They wanted to go and yet were hesitating after all to stand right in front of death was not a happy place to be. Environment at Devon got suffocating and poisonous with each passing day. One can draw the similarities between Devon and America in WWII. how the war was effecting the peace and hesitation of Devon and America to jump in the War..

But this story stands out in how it describe the suffocation that one felt when they come to realize that the bad that they had done need not to be done. The guilt and remorse just eats them out. confession would led to losing the love that they so dearly want and crave and yet in the bottom of their heart they know they don't deserve that trust, devotion, and love.

a beautiful tale of friendship, trust, love, jealousy, and betrayal.

This is a book that I have read and re-read over the years. It is always a revelation to see how one's perception changes over the decades. Of course, re-reading is also a practice which can produce unexpected results.

I used to find the relationship between Gene and Finny touching; this time around I was a little bored. The odd couple of the handsome athlete and introverted bookish boy is now an M/M trope, but this is the seed crystal here. Back in the day, before there was such a thing as gay fiction, we had books like this which hinted but did not say too much. Modern readers are likely to feel frustrated, and claustrophobic.

I picked it up again because when reading about Gore Vidal there is a claim that one of the characters is based on him (Vidal did go to Exeter with John Knowles).

I remember reading this book in high school and being the only one in my class who liked it. Loved it, actually. I just fell head over heels for Finny... I even named my guinea pig Phineas!

Now, 20 years later, I still love A Separate Peace and I still cannot understand why none of my classmates appreciated it. The character dynamic is so complex and the reader has such mixed-up, confused feelings about Gene that NOT appreciating this novel seems impossible to me.

One of my personal favorites.

One of the most fascinating relationship dynamics I've ever read about. Very interesting indeed.

A coming of age novel, with WW2 as a backdrop. I felt a similarness to To Serve Them All My Days which I really enjoyed very much. Both are set in Devon, but this novels focus was from a students perspective, Gene. He is a young man who has a close friendship with Phineas, Finny. Finny is a charasmatic boy, who seems to buck the trend in all areas of his life, he's quite a character and I really enjoyed him. We follow Gene as he returns to school many years later, and the story falls into place. A short novel which I enjoyed, my first of John Knowles. I enjoyed his development of these two boys and could definitely 'feel' them and their growing friendship, he captured nicely the 'toing and frowing' of Gene's internal conflict in his assumption of what Finny is feeling, when he second guesses things and gets them wrong, you could see the internal teenagers 'wheels in motion' as he grapples with self conscious feelings and learning about himself as he goes along. I was left wanting a little bit more at the end, but I still would recommend this book. I came across it mentioned in a recent book I read, and learned that this is an American Classic and I do understand why.