It may be too early to attempt more than a tentative appraisal of the overall achievement of John Knowles. Certainly one can say that he ranks among the most promising young American novelists; and one can recognize the obvious fact that A Separate Peace … has become a small classic among college students and seems likely to last for some time. His other novels, however, have only been noticed in passing: Morning in Antibes and Indian Summer have not really been analyzed and evaluated. Nor is there any substantial critical commentary on Knowles's work as a whole.

I would like to begin such a commentary; and I propose to do so by placing Knowles, as it were—by relating him to the American literary tradition which I see him working within. He is writing what Lionel Trilling has called "the novel of manners"; and it seems to me that there are affinities between his aesthetic preoccupations and those of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. An examination of his subjects, themes, and techniques should show this affinity; and I hope that it will also provide a basis for a reasonably sound estimate of Knowles's stature as a novelist.

From the beginning of his career, Knowles—like James and Fitzgerald—has written about manners, about what Trilling defines as "a culture's hum and buzz of implication … the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made." In Knowles's first novel, A Separate Peace …, the "explicit statements" are the Second World War and its moral effect on American society; the "context" is made up of the precarious situation of American prep-school students who will soon be combatants, and of the moral responses that they, their teachers, and their parents make to this situation.

As many critics have noted, A Separate Peace can be viewed as a war novel, drawing its title from Frederic Henry's personal declaration of personal armistice in [Ernest Hemingway's] A Farewell to Arms. Knowles's concern, however, is not with the direct confrontation of the obvious realities of the battlefield; rather, it is with the impact of war on the minds and sensibilities of individuals who are not, as yet, immmediately involved. The novel examines the cultural upheaval created by the war, and shows how the resulting moral climate affects the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions of Gene Forrester, Phineas, Leper, Brinker, and the others. The novel deals, then, with culture, and with the sensibility of the individual as it is formed by a particular culture: like James and Fitzgerald, Knowles draws the reader's attention to the individual's efforts to adjust to cultural change, and to the quality of his moral responses as he attempts to cope with the disruption of his formerly stable world.

Particularly Jamesian in this novel is Knowles's use of point of view. The narrator, the principal character, is Gene Forrester. On the surface, it appears that he is telling his story honestly, attempting to grapple with his past and forthrightly informing the reader of its significance. Yet, like the narrators of James's "The Liar" or The Aspern Papers, for example, Forrester frequently seems either unaware of or deliberately unwilling to acknowledge the moral nature and consequences of his attitudes and actions. There is, then, a discrepancy between Forrester's judgments and the actions and attitudes he is judging. The reader's awareness of this discrepancy is enforced by the dramatic statements of other characters in the novel, especially by the comments of Leper.

Thus the reader's judgments are not always the same as the narrator's; and so the reader is led to question the narrator's motives and interpretations. Should Forrester be taken at his own evaluation? Or is really, as Leper charges, "a savage underneath" his pose of refined, dispassionate, reflective survivor and recounter of the ordeal? (pp. 335-36)

The complexity—or the ambiguity—of the novel is precisely here, and so is Knowles's debt to James. Neither novelist merely uses his narrator to direct the narrative. Both, instead, use the narrative as the scene and occasion of a complex, dramatic confrontation between the narrator and his past which the reader participates in. For James and Knowles, the aesthetic effect of this type of novel depends on a dramatic interplay between the narrator's judgments and the reader's; and, in this sense, the narrator is the story.

The locale of Knowles's second novel, Morning in Antibes …, naturally leads the reader to think of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Knowles's sleek, sparkling Riviera reminds one of the destructive playground evoked in Tender Is the Night. The similarity extends to the quality of observation: Dick Diver himself might have described the "very young couple" that Nick Bodine sees early in Knowles's novel: "… the girl angelically lovely, tanned and formed for love, the boy like a nearly naked matador."… Knowles's concentration on manners also is akin to Fitzgerald's. Both writers keenly perceive "tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm … the arts of dress or decoration" as signs of cultural trends; and they use these signs to indicate the moral implications of cultural norms and fashions…. (p. 337)

The actual situation and themes of the novel, however, are closer to those of James than to Fitzgerald's. Morning in Antibes offers the classic Jamesian situation of the innocent American encountering the complexities of European culture. The thematic lines of the novel follow James's typical pattern: a conflict between American innocence and European experience is drawn. The naïveté and vitality of the Americans, Nick and his wife Liliane, are juxtaposed to the worldliness and moral sterility of the Europeans, Marc de la Croie and his sister Constance.

The narrative line of the novel revolves around the struggle between these two worlds for the soul of Liliane; and the struggle is drawn in terms of a sharply defined political situation: the rise of De Gaulle in opposition to French Fascism during the Algerian crisis. But the "evanescent context" of manners is all-important in this novel. Liliane's rejection of Marc de la Croie is, of course, a stand against his decadent Fascism: she realizes that he has been "dead for fifteen years," and that in him "nothing survives except the wish to kill."… But she is also repudiating the affluent, corrupt cultural norms and attitudes that he represents. (pp. 337-38)

Politically, the novel, then, raises the question "who will rule France?" But it also asks what moral positions are involved in this struggle for power; and Knowles tries to define the cultural attitudes which are desirable and necessary if the individual is to survive and maintain his integrity. It seems to me that Knowles has advanced beyond the achievement of A Separate Peace. The issues are drawn more precisely; his subject has a greater range; and his evaluation of the material is much more clear than it was in his first novel.

Knowles's latest book, Indian Summer …, is his most ambitious attempt to establish himself as a novelist of genuine stature. In it, he takes up the theme which has obsessed so many major American writers—"the American Dream." And, in dealing with this theme, he seems deliberately to force the reader to think of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby.

Certain affinities between Cleet Kinsolving, the hero of Indian Summer, and Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway are immediately discernible. Both encounter the world of the rich, the wealth and luxury, the success and the good life to which so many Americans aspire. Both act as stewards to the rich: Nick to Gatsby and the Buchanans, Cleet to the Reardon family. (pp. 338-39)

The narrative of Indian Summer is constructed on a series of gradual discoveries about the disintegration of the American Dream. Cleet and Georgia, Neil Reardon's wife, slowly come to an understanding of the cultural and moral realities of wealth; they learn what money and privilege have done to the rich. Their discovery is remarkably close to Nick Carraway's realization that the Buchanans were "careless people" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Cleet encounters the same carelessness, the same ruthlessness. So does Georgia. (p. 339)

It is a case of wealth hideously and dangerously misused. Success has been attained; but the Reardons, like the Buchanans, have lost the American Dream of greatness, the vision of the ideal, which inspired it….

The American Dream now exists only as a memory of what once might have been…. The American Dream has vanished, and now, "as America started into the second half of the twentieth century," Georgia knows that there is no dream worthy of the dreamer, that "the world had become too mechanized for his [Cleet's] kind of nature, he asked too much of life…. What a pity, what a waste, what a tragedy…. He was like a beautifully armored warrior facing a tank."… (p. 340)

Knowles, however, adds another dimension to Cleet Kinsolving. As Georgia realizes, Cleet is "one of the few remaining heirs to a far older tragedy" than the unfulfilled promise of the American Dream. His face, expression, and impassivity exhibit "the last vestiges and relics of his Indian blood … that persistent strain in his nature making him sometimes utterly bewildered by this America today …" (pp. 340-41)

As such, then, Cleet is an embodiment of the "Adamic Myth" which so many critics have seen as characteristic of American literature. And, as such, he can be related to the "bound and affronted" heroes of Henry James, struggling honorably for life amidst those forces which stifle it. He stands with Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Adam Verver, and Milly Theale…. (p. 341)

Clearly, Indian Summer is another step forward for Knowles. He has dared to treat a theme which has been dealt with by some of the masters of American fiction—[James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner], for example. Few contemporary novelists would be willing to risk the obvious comparisons.

It would be foolish, of course, to claim that Knowles belongs in the select company of Fitzgerald and James, to contend that Morning in Antibes and Indian Summer are comparable in quality to Tender Is the Night and [James's] The Ambassadors. But I think that he is an enormously promising novelist, and that he has already achieved a genuine stature. He has exhibited the courage to tackle large subjects and significant themes; and he has treated them with taste, understanding, and considerable technical skill. He certainly deserves more attention than he has received up until now. (pp. 341-42)