[A Separate Peace] is, indeed, a novel of altogether exceptional power and distinction. [Mr. Knowles] writes of a New England preparatory school—what over here would be called a public school—and of two sixteen-year-olds in particular, Finny and Gene, the narrator, who looks back on his wartime schooldays from the standpoint of his present adulthood.
It would be easy to say that Finny is the brilliant, outward-looking athlete, Gene the first-class brain and subtle self-analyser, and that from the element of latent, hardly formulated antagonism which is present in their close friendship springs the tragedy which causes Gene the man to write: "I did not cry then or ever about Finny. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's strait-laced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case."
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