Will I love A Separate Peace?

This book affected me profoundly as a teenager who was questioning his own sexual identity in the early 1970s.

The novel is a study of friendship between two teenage boys at a boarding school after World War II. They’re co-dependent, and the elements of suppression and the threat of violence between the two mirrored my own confusion with close male friends “in real life” at the same time.

This is a book that shaped my early understanding of sexuality, even though the author denied any homoerotic undertones in the story. 

Every prep/boarding school has a Phineas, a campus alpha-dog and star athlete best not to anger, and a Gene, a brainy loner unsure how to navigate a treacherous ecosystem away from loved ones.

The tension is in their intersection – are they friends-of-necessity or adversaries on a collision course? – and what unfolds initially as a tragic accident hardens into a murder mystery that tests one’s conscience and memory.

It remains a stunning, unforgettable book that suggests adolescent history is our real Grim Reaper. 

As a bad boy protagonist, I’ve always loathed Gene Forrester and love to loathe him. He starts as a quiet, intellectual student whose best friend and roommate is charming, self-confident, athletic, and a daredevil without being arrogant. Gene even seems to admire his roommate for having all those qualities until we learn the truth. He resents him. 

Like Gene, there were times in my life when playing wingman to a vastly more popular friend could be frustrating, doubly so when they made terrible decisions. Yet, Gene’s journey to the heart of darkness helps put things in perspective. There is no… show more.

This book was part of my own coming of age. The prep school setting mirrored the struggles I saw, and I could feel the loneliness of those years and the peer pressure I experienced. Looking back now, I still think it’s a book worth reading because teens are under enormous pressure, as the boys in the book were then.

The reason I chose this book is simple. It was the first one to show me the first-person way.

I read this book in high school around 1973 and it stayed with me all these years. This dark side of adolescence skillfully narrated by the introverted Gene is as real today for me as it was when I was a prep school kid reading it.

Gene remembers some fifteen years earlier as he comes back to visit, and tells this story under the guise of a quintessential American story, though as he says “a very untypical one, I guess, and… show more.

I tried to avoid boarding school novels while writing my book, fearing the sort of subliminal influence that would subject my own book to accusations of being derivative, but about a month ago I returned to A Separate Peace for the first time since maybe ninth grade.

I was struck by a lot that I’d missed then—namely the undercurrent of bristling homoerotic tension between Gene and Finny—but more pointedly, I felt a new sense of solidarity with Gene, who narrates the events of one summer at boarding school from the comparatively distant vantage of early adulthood. I recall Gene the… show more.

A Separate Peace published in 1958 is a terrific example of a coming-of-age novel and perhaps the first one I myself read in this genre. 

I read the novel as a teenager and found that I had to read it twice to truly understand it. The story is set in England during WWII and shows the closes friendship of two young men, Phineas, a charismatic, outgoing athlete and Gene Forrester, an introverted, intellectual who is secretly jealous of his friend. Without ruining the story, Gene commits a hideous, physical act to destroy Phineas.

Reading this when so young, I had… show more.

Novels I love make me feel—and think. A Separate Peace does that for me as I lived each moment with Gene as he shared a poignant moment of his life. He experienced a friendship—a love—that was difficult for him to get his head around. I know he would have done anything to have a “do over,” and I felt for him and for Finny.

A good book is worth reading many times and that I have done. Each time I learned something new about this once-in-a-lifetime friendship. Like all relationships, they are full of joy and pain. Knowles was a… show more.

Don’t let this book’s appearance on ninth-grade reading lists for the last 50 years convince you that it has no modern message for adults and teens. I toyed with putting a different title on my list here, something scathing and contemporary, but the truth is, few books have affected me as much as A Separate Peace. Yes, I read this in high school, and under duress, like most things I did in high school, but I was captivated by the trifecta of elements that have informed many of my favorite books: New England setting, boarding school, and complex feelings… show more.

A Separate Peace is required reading in many high school honors English classes. Having not taken honor classes, I had never read the book until my novel was released and was recommended by reviewers as a diverse companion book. When I read A Separate Peace, set in on a US campus during WWII, I could see the similarities. However, this book is a quiet subtle story. Still, I wish I had been introduced to A Separate Peace in high school, during the Vietnam War. It truly is a timeless classic about morality, patriotism, and the loss of innocence.