A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
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Book Summary Information
Author: John KnowlesEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Published: 1953
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 196
Publisher: Bantam Books
Book Reviews of A Separate Peace
Book Review: A Line Runs Through the Human Heart
Summary: 5 Stars
Walking down the aisles of a bookstore or a library and encountering a book called A Separate Peace, flipping open the cover and noting that the copyright is dated 1959, it would not be much of an intuitive leap for the reader to guess that the subject matter involved war. The reader would be right, though he or she could not possibly intuit the richly layered tale that unfolds as pages turn, one by one, between the front and the back cover.
Set in an all male and very exclusive high school academy (Devon), this boarding school drama takes place in late 1942 and early 1943. Though populated with a rich assortment of characters, the book revolves predominantly around only two, Gene and Phineas (Finny). Attending a summer session at Devon, Gene and Finny form the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session, and the two charter members seal their friendship by leaping from a tree into a river. The tree, the origin of the cornerstone event that anchors the novel, is "tremendous, an irate steely black steeple beside the river." In this tree, while attempting the dangerous leap into deep water on two separate occasions, both Gene and Finny will lose their balance. In one instance, a steady hand shoots out to save the other friend. In the other, no hand is forthcoming, and the friend plunges downward towards an injury that will permanently alter the life course of both boys. This fall is the polar axis upon which John Knowles, author of one of the most unusual of all books written about wars, be they personal or political, allows his tale to revolve.
Only distantly related to the genre of anti-war books, A Separate Peace does not have the gritty and blasted geography of trench warfare in All Quiet on the Western Front, the brilliant cynicism and satire of Catch-22, or the surrealistic and all TOO realistic horror of Slaughterhouse-Five. Knowles' approach to human on human violence, be it two individuals in combat or millions against millions, is subtle, almost understated. After listening to two of his friends debate about the causes of WW II, Gene dissents: "Because it seems 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." Why might Gene's statement be important? Because it disallows us the convenience of separating people that fight wars into good folk and evil monsters. Alexander Solzhenitsyn chimes in here "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Knowles, a winner of the Penn/Faulkner Award, was a brilliant observer of human nature. It is somewhat eerie to see the close correlation of his observations with cutting edge 21st century advances in the nature of human memory and the biological roots of aggressive human behavior (including war). Recent research has made it compellingly clear that we humans are able to freely construct memories that are more consistent with the personal narratives that we want to tell ourselves than they are with accurate depiction of past events. In the recently published Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, Potts and Hayden discuss the research that shows that our primate roots have left "something ignorant in the human heart", something uniquely male in nature. John Knowles, through simple observation, beat Potts and Hayden to the punch by a half century.
Several brief thoughts, if you are considering reading this book. This is a book about men, and the few women that appear are almost ghost-like. Though written more than fifty years ago, the level of craftsmanship and wordsmithing in A Separate Piece has not been surpassed in the 21st century. Although the story is engaging, connoisseurs of prose will find it much more to their liking than will aficionados of action novels. Historical fiction buffs will get a kick both from the powerfully nostalgic description of war-time America and from the fact that characters in the book are reportedly modeled on well known people, e.g. Gore Vidal (one of Knowles' classmates in real life) claims that he was the model for the Devon upperclassman Brinker. Not a page turner, but deeply evocative for those with the leisure to let the ebb and flow of Knowles' prose wash gently over them, A Separate Piece has become defined as a classic. This reader agrees wholeheartedly with that designation.
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