I love WWII. My old man loves WWII. A Separate Peace takes place during WWII. But I do not love A Separate Peace. Like so many others, I was forced to experience this severe medium of torture through an English Honors class. As I was reading this book, I could not help but to wonder why sleeping pills weren’t just done away with altogether when John Knowles wrote this. I mean, watching the grass grow is more exhilarating. To be quite frank, A Separate Peace literally put me to sleep. I read five paragraphs and I was soon dozing away.

Set at an all-male prep school in the New England town of Devon in 1942, A Separate Peace tells the story of... Wait. Allow me to reiterate. A Separate Peace drones on about a group of boys attending this school. The protagonist, Gene Forrester, faces an exciting adventure that takes him to North Africa. Serving under the legendary George Patton himself, Gene... Hold on a moment... Sorry. That’s what I wish this story were about. No, no... Gene never fights in the war. He just hangs with his friends, helping to express his friend Phineas’s wiener morals and creating a bad influence for any student who is forced to read this slop.

Wiener morals??? Phineas, or “Finny”, as he is referred to by his buds, has a stupid little philosophy that sports should have no winners and no losers. Has anybody heard that Rush Limbaugh commercial? It goes something like this: “I used to play soccer. I used to be goalie. But we don’t keep score anymore...” Well, what’s the use of sports if competition is gone from them? Why do you think football fans were so enraged by “the Heidi game”?

For those of you who don’t keep up with sports (I know I hardly don’t), “the Heidi game” was the infamous football game that was cut short by the movie Heidi, starring Shirley Temple. It’s been so long, I’ve plumb forgotten who the two opposing teams were, but this game was CLOSE. The scores were tied neck and neck until the last half minute or so of the game. The network that happened to be airing this game had Heidi to be scheduled directly after the game. Because the game was running overtime, the last few minutes of it were cut off to show the movie. Football fans have been enraged ever since, and you can bet your bottom dollar everybody learned from this mistake. It was the competition, the closeness of the game that made fans angry.

I may not be a sports fanatic, but even I can tell you competition makes a sports game interesting. Everybody I asked said quite basically the same thing. Who ever got a real, pure sense of achievement by just playing without keeping track of who won and who lost? I'd rather know I lost and get a sense of moral achievement from what I, as an individual, did than play without any idea about which is the superior team. Losing and winning are a pair of intensely good things. If you lose, you are given the opportunity to take notice of your weaknesses so that you can correct your faults and make yourself a better player. Likewise, winning allows you to observe your strengths and improve on them.

Finny invents the game “blitzball” (i.e. Blitzkrieg Ball; no, Final Fantasy X fans, this is NOT the same “blitzball”), a game in which the ball is simply passed back and forth, and the possessor of the ball must try to keep the ball away from the others, or something like that. I really cannot begin to describe the game; it’s totally illogical and implements the “let’s not keep score” attitude, so I can’t even begin to make sense of it.

Phineas also jumps from a very tall tree whose branches hang out over the nearby river. How tall? Falling in the shallows would probably break your spine, yet Phineas does it anyway. And like any nutcase doing something dangerously stupid tends to do, he gets others, including Gene in on the act. In fact, jumping from this tree is the initiation act that allows members to join Finny’s “Secret Suicide Society of the Summer Session.” Yissiree... There’s nothing like reading about teenagers forming suicide clubs when you’re a troubled, overstressed teenager yourself!

The rest of the book is best summarized as, “Yadda yadda yadda...” Phineas gets his leg busted to pieces because Gene was jealous of him and pushed him out of their little suicide tree (more bad influence). The book never really tends to get interesting... ever. You’ll read a page and think, Man, I’m pretty sure I read a LOT since I last checked... What? ONE PAGE!!! @$*%&^!!! As I said before, Knowles drones on and on and on, but he never seems to accomplish anything.

A book’s influence is like eating at a restaurant. Some authors shove the themes down your throat. Others offer the morals politely on a clean plate decorated with pretty shreds of parsley. Sci-fi writers are like cooks at Japanese restaurants – they play with their ethical ideas right in front of you and let you have fun before you ingest them. Knowles just gives you his ideals all mutilated and cut up so that you vomit and never want to read his works again. One thing I hate most is overrated books that fail to achieve their goal yet still manage to get English teachers to “Ooh... Ahhh...” Spare me. Written by a mediocre author who apparently thinks he’s hot stuff, A Separate Peace is a pitiful attempt that comes off as arrogant.

Recommended: No