Having long dreamed of attending a prep school like Exeter that Knowles fictionalizes in both A Separate Peace and Peace Breaks Out, I recently re-read A Separate Peace and read Peace Breaks Out for the first time this spring. As an aside, I don't know if it is possible for former Exonians to write about their school without an undercurrent of death. In addition to Knowles, John Irving has written at least two novels, The World According to Garp and A Widow for One Year that are all partially set at a fictionalized Exeter and have students dying and a fair amount of violence in their narratives.
The main focus of A Separate Peace is the relationship between Gene and Phineas, who is an amazing natural athlete. I thought Knowles created a really believable and vivid friendship between these two and did an admirable job of getting into the psyche of adolescent boys in WWII America. I found him to be a dazzling and eloquent writer too.
Skip twenty years or so into the future in real time, but only a few years in fictional time and we have another novel set at this same school with a protagonist who is an alum returning from WW II to his old school to become a teacher. The tone is entirely different and if I didn't know any better, I wouldn't have attributed Peace Breaks Out to the same other as A Separate Peace. It is a much more cynical book and Knowles for the most part abandons the poetic and elegiac tone of his earlier work.
Czar
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