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I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.Regular readers of my reviews of classics know that I regularly used Cliff’s Notes in school. I had a library of them. I’d always (often? occasionally?) try to read the book, but when I got bored, I’d stop reading the book and just turn to my buddy Cliff. But every now and then, a book would grab my interest and I’d truly read it. A Separate Peace was one of those books.
Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy, and so began an obsessive labor of defense, began to parry the menace they saw facing them by developing a particular frame of mind, “You see,” their behavior toward everything and everyone proclaimed, “I am a humble ant, I am nothing, I am not worthy of this menace,” or else, like Mr. Ludsbury, “How dare this threaten me, I am much too good for this sort of handling, I shall rise above this,” or else, like Quackenbush, strike out at it always and everywhere, or else, like Brinker, develop a careless general resentment against it, or else, like Leper, emerge from a protective cloud of vagueness only to meet it, the horror, face to face, just as he had always feared, and so give up the struggle absolutely.
All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.
A Separate Peace is mostly one long flashback. Gene Forrester has returned to his old New England boarding school, Devon, fifteen years after he graduated in 1943. He thinks back upon his last year in school, which was dominated by the fact that his class would soon be enlisting or drafted into the war. And he thinks about his best friend, Phineas. While Gene was bookish and a bit reserved, Finny (at least in Gene’s memory) was nearly perfect: not only effortlessly charming, gregarious, and athletic, but also kind and genuine. Gene plainly loves Finny—platonically if not romantically (there isn’t much textual support for a romantic interpretation, but I get why some people read it that way)—but Finny is such a bright light that he unintentionally leaves Gene feeling like he’s trapped in the shadow. And in a moment full of envy and jealousy, Gene does something that changes his best friend’s life.
Each time I reread A Separate Peace I go into it with a fairly clean slate because a fair amount of story is not that memorable, which is an odd thing to say about a favorite book I’ve read multiple times. I always forget the fun details, the carefree portions of the story: the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, blitzball, Finny’s refusal to believe WWII was real, the Winter Carnival. Instead I always remember the constant presence of the war just beyond the horizon, and the novel’s dark core: Gene and Finny, the tree and the stairs, the sad story of Elwin "Leper" Lepellier, the inquiry and the ending.
Because it’s the dark parts of A Separate Peace that made such an impression on me all those years ago. Every teenager has a friend who they love in one way or another even while feeling inferior to, or envious or jealous of them. Seeing that kind of complicated relationship on the page, seeing Gene act on that shameful side of himself, and what it cost him, resonated deeply in my teenage brain. And not just with me. I had a friendship in high school that had some of this same tangled emotional energy, and when one of us did something accidentally (let’s be honest, sometimes intentionally) to sabotage the other, we’d talk about it later literally using shorthand references to Gene and Finny. The fact that Gene came through the other side changed, and seemingly a better person, was a hopeful sign that I too would eventually outgrow such petty thoughts.
Is A Separate Peace objectively a great book? Probably, as it was a finalist for the National Book Award. But like Gene returning to Devon, I can’t quite see it clearly. As much as I try to read it critically, it’s always more of an emotional experience. Highly recommended, especially if you somehow weren’t required to read it in school (or if you cheated your way through it then
