Knowles surely has been urged many times over the years to write a sequel to his most successful novel, the much admired A Separate Peace, set at the Exeter-like academy called Devon School. [Peace Breaks Out] is that sequel. Devon alumnus Pete Hallam has returned to his alma mater to teach, having survived the Second World War—just starting in the first book—in a prisoner-of-war camp. Knowles knows Devon's turf thoroughly, and, as in the earlier book, his keen eye for examining the ambitions and motivations of his student foils gives more than average interest to his tale. Yet his heart clearly isn't in this project, the attractive economical prose style of A Separate Peace here reduced to almost a shorthand, as if there were a pressing need to finish and be done with it.

A review of "Peace Breaks Out," in The Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright...