A Separate Peace is a short, thoughtful, ambitious American study of a fatal relationship between two upper-class schoolboys in late adolescence during the war…. There are several abrupt and pleasing variations from conventional American attitudes, including a pretence that the war does not exist. Mr Knowles has clearly worked hard on this novel, modelling it carefully on the best neo-Forsterian, Trillingesque lines. Yet somehow it just fails to convince. The school background exerts none of the fascination that generally belongs to these most compelling of institutional frameworks. Gene and Finney seem to be performing their odd psychological warfare in a vacuum. Gene is particularly unsatisfactory; he has almost none of the ego-sense that you expect in a first-person narrator and it makes him difficult to identify with.

Maurice Richardson, in his review of "A Separate Peace," in New Statesman (© 1959 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. LVII, No...