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May 30, 2018
Once in a blue moon, a novel comes along that leaves you feeling that the author began with something like this impulse: Here is the experience that has most shaken and shaped me, and I am going to make a book of it. Such an undertaking requires considerable caution, as well as, probably, a necessary measure of throwing caution to the winds. In his 1959 A Separate Peace, the late John Knowles took on the challenge and proved himself fully equal to it. I don’t know how I managed to miss it until now, but I’m grateful finally to have aded this classic American coming-of-age novel to my experience. It’s impossible to quote adequately from such a rich total fabric, but here’s a taste, one of the descriptions of Devon, the fictional New England prep school that is the setting for the novel:’ “The school had been largely rebuilt with a massive bequest from an oil family some years before in a peculiar style of Puritan grandeur, as though Versailles had been modified for the needs of a Sunday school. This opulent sobriety betrayed the divided nature of the school, just as in a different way the two rivers that it straddled did. From the outside the buildings were reticent, severe straight lines of red brick or white clapboard, with shutters standing sentinel beside each window, and a few unassuming white cupolas placed here and there on the roofs because they were expected and not pretty, like Pilgrim bonnets. “But one you passed through the Colonial doorways, with only an occasional fan window or low relief pillar to suggest that a certain muted adornment was permissible, you entered an extravaganza of Pompadour splendor …” My only previous experience with Knowles was his sturdy introduction to G. B. Edwards’ posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Ebenezer LePage (pronounced Le as in French and Page as in a book, as the irresistibly quirky narrator early on informs us), one of the select few novels of the 20th Century I most enthusiastically recommend. So take this as a recommendation of two novels, one widely read and celebrated and the other unjustly neglected.