A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
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Book Summary Information
Author: John KnowlesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-10-07
ISBN: 0743253973
Number of pages: 204
Publisher: Scribner
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780743253970
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A Separate Peace
Book Review: Why This Book is Ughy - and Maybe Dangerous in a Way
Summary: 2 Stars
A Separate Peace is ughy. Before I get into that, I want to give you an idea of what kind of person I am (gotta establish some "cred" here! ;-). I love everything that has "true grit" -- from "Alphabet of Manliness" (extremely funny) to the great, amazing and utterly fantastic political philosopher, Leo Strauss (check out his great essays "Jerusalem and Athens" "Progress or Return" "An Interpretation of Genesis" if you want to experience what thinking IS!!!!)
I grew up reading everything by Hemingway (esp. loved the Nick Adams stories); then by Flannery O'Connor (fabulous in the extreme!) and on and on -- I love Dostoyevsky...I spent 10 years adoring Solzhenitsyn (check out "The First Circle" "Cancer Ward" etc. etc. I read "The Gulag" in its entirety, etc. etc. etc.) and reading dissident literature that made it out of the USSR on microfilm, to be published in the West...
When I was 35 I read Allan Bloom's fine translation of Plato's Republic and The Laws -- WOW!!! Everyone should read those two amazing amazing books....and Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" from 1987 is fantastic, as is his amazing "Politics and the Arts: On the Rousseau's Letter to D'Alembert on the Theatre"...
BUT ! ! ! I recently told a friend I didn't like A Separate Peace; I didn't like the idea of this 'friend' hurting his friend out of jealousy. Like this was supposed to be profound. Like this would/could happen.
She wrote me back, "That's just what is so compelling about it - that envy we have in tight control, it just needs a second to squeak past our discipline - and in the book, with such devestating results. Anyone of us might do that - just that one second of relaxing our guard, the right opportunity, the second where you don't take in the consequences..."
No, I quite disagree.
My friend went on further to say, "It's like The Rhyme (Rime?) of the Ancient Mariner - like the albatross, this friend is so beautiful - so the mariner shoots it - like out of a weird envy of its goodness - just destroys it. I think it's a very basic and universal impulse. I love in the Gospel of John where it says something like: 'And as for Jesus, He trusted Himself to none of them. He knew too well the hearts of men.'"
I totally disagree (I mean, I agree with Jesus, but he came to have his teachings penetrate and change people -- he was betrayed, like Phineas was in A Separate Peace!).
I agree with these parts of a couple of reviews of A Separate Peace, which I found here on Amazon:
"In the book, when Gene got Finny to fall from the tree, that is just something a friend wouldn't do. No matter how mad you are at your friend you wouldn't push your friend out of a tree so that you can be better than him. Friends aren't like that."
and from another review:
"High school boys don't think like that, they're not murderous crazy people they're boys."
THEY GOT IT! THEY PUT THEIR FINGER ON EXACTLY WHAT BOTHERED ME DEEPLY ABOUT THIS BOOK WHEN I READ IT YEARS AGO.
First, let's get this straight: Like all fiction, the plot in A Separate Peace is MADE UP. Reading fiction involves the famous "willing suspension of disbelief" which is a fabulous gift from above; it enables us to read fiction and by it, to learn and have our souls changed. But once we've read a book, it's REALLY OK to look at it and criticize it from many angles. (Just lay off my perfect Solzhenitsyn, O'Connor, etc., OK? ;-)
Second,
What kind of political and religious viewpoint would an author of a book like A Separate Peace HAVE? I think one can see that said viewpoint is quite confused.
I consider A Separate Peace to be an example, an iteration, of shock literature.
WHY ARE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS SUBJECTED TO "SHOCK LITERATURE"??? THEY STILL ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO IT AS WE SPEAK. You know why? Plato talks about the tendency in a democracy to have the old suck up to the young. The teacher being afraid of the student, and hence "flattering them." "SEE, WE'RE COOL, YOU'RE COOL - SEE THE STUFF WE LET YOU READ? IN FACT WE MAKE YOU READ? WE'RE REALISTIC, WE'RE NOT PRUDES! HARD TRUTHS, LET AT 'EM!"
I googled to find out about Knowles' political and religious viewpoint and didn't find what I wanted explicitly, but this will do (from someone called Ruel E. Foster) - Tho I disagree with Ruel's praise of A Separate Peace and think it too suffers from the flaws discussed below:
"Every novel but his first suffers from one fundamental defect--the characters are not plausible. There is not a single memorable woman character in his fiction and only two male characters--Gene Forrester and Phineas--that stay in our memory. The result is an imperfect empathy and a resultant lack of reader interest. In general his male protagonists are inert, deracinated, ambivalent, depersonalized, dehumanized. Why does Knowles create such types? Only he can answer this definitively, but perhaps he gives us the answer in his book Double Vision where he argues against roots and for rootlessness, the new form of nomadism. "We need to be nomadic and uprooted today," he maintains. As he says, he is not regional, does not come from a town or a city. He is one of the live-around-the-world people. So he is and so are the characters in his books. This is his fundamental failure and it is a major one. He may yet overcome this and give us again a convincing, brilliant novel as was A Separate Peace."
I deny that A Separate Peace is a convincing or brilliant novel.
It contains a terrible ughy idea to set before young people. There are so so so so many great things out there that kids could read. IMHO, keep them away from this.
Summary of A Separate Peace
Set at a boys? boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is John Knowles?s crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic.
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