None of the books John Knowles has written since A Separate Peace has achieved nearly the critical or popular success of his first novel. The reason is not that Knowles has exhausted his knowledge of the world but that A Separate Peace has a rare unity of subject and style. Knowles is a graceful and lucid writer, but his ability to use language most effectively seems to require a specific focus to prevent style from becoming merely decorative, an end in itself. Knowles's task in A Separate Peace, to establish the authenticity of Gene's sensibility — that is, his heightened sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world and his capacity for intense feeling about human nature — required the creation of a lyric voice to register the range of emotional response with poetic precision. His.....
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