33: A Separate Peace

A Separate Peace
John Knowles
2 stars

I finally finished this book. It took me 2 months. I just couldn't get all the way into it... and at the end, it fell sort of flat for me. I like what I think the author was trying to say, but I just don't think he made a slam dunk with this one. Which may be against the grain, because apparently this is a pretty popular book for high school English classes, though I never read it-- never even heard of it, actually, until this past summer.

This book is set at a boys' boarding school in New England during the early years of WWII. Two boys, best friends (kind of?), have a tumultuous summer punctuated with a terrible accident (or was it?), and then an even more tragic autumn. They have it rough, these boys. Everyone knows they are basically being groomed to enter the military as soon as they are of age. There is this Great War hanging over their heads, but it doesn't seem real to them. They keep hearing about it, but they don't really get it. And of course they don't. They are children. War is incomprehensible to all but the few who have seen it and lived to tell. This is the aspect of the plot I could get behind. I could feel the pressure hanging over them, and the bewilderment of not really knowing what war is, what would be expected of them, even what they were being sent off to fight and possibly die for.

Gene and Phineas are presented as best friends and polar opposites. Finny is the BMOC, the jock, the uber talented, handsome daredevil. Gene is the introverted intellectual. He does what Finny says, most of the time grudgingly. Finny thinks they genuinely like each other, but the reader is (or at least I was) left wondering what was really going on. Their friendship is never very convincing to me. It feels forced-- the author says it's so, so it is, but I wish I could have believed it. The story is told from Gene's point of view and it's clear from his inner monologue that he has some serious ill feelings towards Finny that are never fully resolved. In fact, the main conflict in the book is actually an "accident" that befalls Finny that Gene causes. When it happens, it happens because Gene, always quietly simmering in anger at Finny, suffers a momentary lapse of reason. He acts without giving a thought to what the consequences could be. A really stupid whim, in other words. This action sets off a chain of events that affect everyone.

If you read this book in high school, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of it then. If you've read it since then, I'd be even more interested to hear if you liked it. For me, I could take it or leave it. 2 stars.