A Separate Peace is one such book. Where would I have found it, anyway? But it happened to be one of the choices in our last round of novel groups this school year (and my last ever at my current school). The description given by my teacher wasn't too detailed, but I was intrigued, and I felt like I would like it, and so I picked it. I'm happy about that. ( :
Gene Forrester goes to a Devon, a boys' boarding school in New Hampshire in World War II. He focuses on his schoolwork with the intention to do his best, but his roommate and best friend Phineas ("Finny") has very different ideas of what to do with the Summer Session. Finny is spectacular; Gene sees him as perfect. He walks so evenly, he's the best as sports, he talks smoothly, he can get himself out of any trouble, no matter how many rules he's broken. He also fails impressively at the academic side of school. But nonetheless, he is without flaws in Gene's mind; he needs nothing more to be perfect. When Finny begins to encourage the few boys remaining over that summer to jump out of this large tree and into the middle of the Devon River, the session turns deadly. Gene begins questioning his friendship with Finny, wondering how much is built on actual liking and how much on fierce competition. One day, Gene and Finny are about to do a double jump out of the tree when a blind impulse seizes Gene. Finny ends up with a broken leg, but more than his limb is shattered. This accident changes the entire lives of these two boys and, to a degree, their classmates' lives change as well. Amid the crazy world of 1942 and 1943, teenage boys learn about living and living together.
I loved the relationship between Gene and Phineas--it is complex, dynamic, dysfunctional, loving, confused, broken and fixed in a thousand places, born and kept alive out of necessity. Neither one of them could live without it, and yet it's awful for them both. They are a part of each other; that's really the ultimate thing that they realize about it.
I was also astonished by how they dealt with the accident. Imagine if you were pretty sure that your best friend had caused your crippling injury, but you still wished that it was't true. What would you do? How would you feel? I couldn't fathom that, but the way Finny handles it is quite remarkable and incredible.
A Separate Peace is full of an odd kind of philosophy. It's basically existentialism that doesn't realize itself. Probably a lot of teenage boys and girls have the same kind of philosophical revelations that Gene and Finny have, but they don't realize what they are, which is really too bad, since they could go so much further if only they had a name to their discoveries, and if only they knew that they were a part of something old and huge, and this is a run-on sentence, oh dear.
The characters also had fantastic names. Gene Forrester--alluding to the tree, I believe. Phineas--a Greek name; he's never even given a last name, which adds to the image of him as superhuman. There're more, but I wouldn't be able to go on without giving away a lot.
Actually, it's quite hard to talk about this book without giving away major plot points, which is too bad, since there's a lot about A Separate Peace that. Unfortunately, that shortens this review. But A Separate Peace is a short book (around 200 pages), although a very good one, and Knowles managed to pack a whole lot into such a little novel.
In short, I would recommend this book to people who like this kind of book. A Separate Peace is definitely not for everyone, but people who enjoy having teenagers, boarding schools, World War II, friendship, and subtle philosophy in their books will really love this one.