The Books: “A Separate Peace” (John Knowles)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA fiction:

Next book on the shelf is A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

This book always makes me think of my sister Jean – I know how much she loves it. The character Phineas is one that most teenagers can really look up to – and admire. He’s mysterious, he’s interesting, he’s – in the end, he’s tragic. I haven’t read this book in years – but I have fond memories of it. It takes place at a boarding school for boys during WWII. The narrator goes back and forth between the past (his boyhood at the school) and the present (his visit to the school as an adult – and you can tell that something BAD is coming from how the present-day voice speaks). Gene is the narrator. As a boy, he’s lonely, smart – not really meant to be a popular kid. Phineas, on the other hand, is a true loner – but not in the same way. He’s a loner in that he has an aura of greatness, of individuality – that the other kids sense and respect. I knew guys like that in my school. They could get away with ANYthing because they seemed so confident, so devil-may-care. Josh Lott was a guy who was a couple years ahead of me – and he was like that. He was insanely good-looking (as a matter of fact, we all called him “hot” – “Hotness” is very different from “cute”. “Hot” implies sex appeal – which he had!), he was very smart, and he just did not care what people thought about him. He was popular – but he didn’t care about that. He was friends with everyone. He would wear clothes from thrift stores – he dressed like Herb Brooks in the 1970s. I’m not kidding – you know the clothes Brooks wore during the 1980 Olympics on the sidelines? Josh Lott dressed like that. Our high school was very clothes-conscious, very label-conscious … Things were brutal if you did not have the right clothes. Josh Lott would stroll through school wearing PLAID PANTS and get away with it. Phineas is kind of like that.

The two boys become friends, kind of … but there is tension. WWII hangs over the book. The spectre of war, and what will be waiting for them when they graduate. Phineas is on a different plane than the other kids. He seems purely good. He’s a daredevil – he’s an incredible (and naturally gifted) athlete – but he’s not competitive, or not in the way it is expected – he doesn’t seem to hold any malice or hatred or resentment in his soul. Gene doesn’t understand this. Finny doesn’t have to work at being good at things. Things just come easily to him. And yet somehow he is not resented for this. Josh Lott again!

I don’t remember the ins and outs of the plot – but I do know that it’s a tragic ending – the ending of the book has a betrayal in it so huge it took my breath away when I was a kid. And two lives are forever changed.

In its own quiet way, this book has become a classic for adolescents.

Here was one of my favorite parts of the book when I was a kid. I remember reading it and feeling, like Gene, frustrated and baffled by Finny. Like: you have to TELL someone what you just did!!! But the fact that Finny DOESN’T tell, and that he doesn’t CARE to tell – is the key to his character.

From A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

One day he broke the school swimming record. He and I were fooling around in the pool, near a big bronze plaque marked with events for which the school kept records – 50 yards, 100 yards, 220 yards. Under each was a slot with a marker fitted into it, showing the name of the record-holder, his year, and his time. Under “100 Yards Free Style” there was “A. Hopkins Parker — 1940 — 53.0 seconds.”

“A. Hopkins Parker?” Finny squinted up at the name. “I don’t remember any A. Hopkins Parker.”

“He graduated before we got here.”

“You mean that record has been up there the whole time we’ve been at Devon and nobody’s busted it yet?” It was an insult to the class, and Finny had tremendous loyalty to the class, as he did to any group he belonged to, beginning with him and me and radiating outward past the limits of humanity toward spirits and clouds and stars.

No one else happened to be in the pool. Around us gleamed white tile and glass brick; the green, artificial-looking water rocked gently in its shining basin, releasing vague chemical smells and a sense of many pipes and filters; even Finny’s voice, trapped in this closed, high-ceilinged room, lost its special resonance and blurred into a general well of noise gathered up toward the ceiling. He said blurringly, “I have a feeling I can swim faster than A. Hopkins Parker.”

We found a stop watch in the office. He mounted a starting box, leaned forward from the waist as he had seen racing swimmers do but never had occasion to do himself – I noticed a preparatory looseness coming into his shoulders and arms, a controlled ease about his stance which was unexpectedc in anyone trying to break a record. I said, “On your mark — Go!” There was a complex moment when his body uncoiled and shot forward with sudden metallic tension. He planed up the pool, his shoulders dominating the water while his legs and feet rode so low that I couldn’t distinguish them; a wake rippled hurriedly by him and then at the end of the pool his position broke, he relaxed, dived, an instant’s confusion and then his suddenly and metallically tense body shot back toward the other end of the pool. Another turn and up the pool again – I noticed no particular slackening of his pace – another turn, down the pool again, his hand touched the end, and he looked up at me with a composed, interested expression. “Well, how did I do?” I looked at the watch; he had broken A. Hopkins Parker’s record by .7 seconds.

“My God! So I really did it. You know what? I thought I was going to do it. It felt as though I had that stop watch in my head and I could hear myself going just a little bit faster than A. Hopkins Parker.”

“The worst thing is there weren’t any witnesses. And I’m no official timekeeper. I don’t think it will count.”

“Well of course it won’t count.”

“You can try it again and break it again. Tomorrow. We’ll get the coach in here, and all the official timekeepers and I’ll call up The Devonian to send a reporter and a photographer –”

He climbed out of the pool. “I’m not going to do it again,” he said quietly.

“Of course you are!”

“No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don’t want to do it in public.” Some other swimmers drifted in through the door. Finny glanced sharply at them. “By the way,” he said in an even more subdued voice, “we aren’t going to talk about this. It’s just between you and me. Don’t say anything about it, to … anyone.”

“Not say anything about it! When you broke the school record!”

“Sh-h-h-h-h!” He shot a blazing, agitated glance at me.

I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn’t look directly back at me. “You’re too good to be true,” I said after a while.

He glanced at me, and then said, “Thanks a lot,” in a somewhat expressionless voice.

Was he trying to impress me or something? Not tell anybody? When he had broken a school record without a day of practice? I knew he was serious about it, so I didn’t tell anybody. Perhaps for that reason his accomplishment took root in my mind and grew rapidly in the darkness where I was forced to hide it. The Devon School record books contained a mistake, a lie, and nobody knew it but Finny and me. A. Hopkins Parker was living in a fool’s paradise, wherever he was. His defeated name remained in bronze on the school record plaque, while Finny deliberately evaded an athletic honor. It was true that he had many already – the Winslow Galbraith Memorial Football Trophy for having brought the most Christian sportsmanship to the game during the 1941-1942 season, the Margaret Duke Bonaventura ribbon and prize for the student who conducted himself at hocky most like the way her son had done, the Devon School Contact Sport Award, Presented Each Year to That Student Who in the Opinion of the Athletic Advisors Excels His Fellows in the Sportsmanlike Performance of Any Game Involving Bodily Contact. But these were in the past, and they were prizes, not school records. The sports Finny played officially – football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse – didn’t have school records. To switch to a new sport suddenly, just for a day, and immediately break a record in it — that was about as neat a trick, as dazzling a reversal as I could, to be perfectly honest, possibly imagine. There was something inebriating in the suppleness of this feat. When I thought about it my head felt a little dizzy and my stomach began to tingle. It had, in one word, glamour, absolute schoolboy glamour. When I looked down at that stop watch and realized a split second before I permitted my face to show it or my voice to announce it that Finny had broken a school record, I had experienced a feeling that also can be described in one word – shock.

To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too unusual for — not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry.

“Swimming in pools is screwy anyway,” he said after a long, unusual silence as we walked toward the dormitory. “The only real swimming is in the ocean.”