Best of 2005: The Posts That Made You Angry

Someone wanted more prep-school novel reviews here?

The best scence in the overpraised and banal film Sideways comes near the end when the fat nerveless alcoholic schoolteacher is shown in front of his class as a student reads aloud. The student is reading from John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, a book often read by parochial schoolkids and one that might have been a better choice of material for the Sideways adapters.

I reread A Separate Peace over the weekend and was surprised by its resonance. It moves quicker than Gatsby. Knowles’ book ostensibly concerns two young men, Gene and Phineas, and their life and times at Devon, a lush boarding school modled after Knowles’ own alma mater Phillips Exeter. Gene and Finny have the run of the school, and are leaders in both study and recreation. An incident high on a tree branch injures Finny, and the circumstances of the incident that caused his fall unfolds before the school, with the boys both involved and unconcerned with perceptions and resulting actions.

The true main character of A Separate Peace is WWII. It is 1942 when the book kicks off and the boys are 16 years old and damn nervous about their upcoming conscriptions. They release their anxieties by cutting school and smoking in the basement of their dorm, but the fear that they will die while young never abates. Knowles however does not preach nor proselytize about fate. His prose is laconic and romantic, factual yet lyrical, and fear is portrayed as it truly is for the young; distant, avoidable, and possibly exhilerating.

Two thoughts bounced around while I reexperienced Knowles’ book. One had to do with that most recent prep school golden boy we were all abuzz about six short months ago. That John Kerry evolved from a great man in his younger years into the droll cunt he became while praising abortion adicts and homosexuals reminded me that the young Kerry is still the one we must keep in mind. The other thought concerned another John, this one called Updike. I kept wanting that he should be the one splayed on his kitchen floor; self inflicted, sure, or perhaps done in by a drunken William Styron. I still miss Hunter, who thankfully never cared to grow up.