The continuing appeal of "A Separate Peace" has little to do with its wartime atmosphere, though that is well handled. Rather, the attraction is its central character, Phineas, the 16-year-old epitome of "schoolboy glamour" who is done to death over the course of a school year. Phineas, with his gift for fantasy, capacity for affection and sheer physical grace, must stand somewhere between [F. Scott Fitzgerald's] Gatsby and [John Irving's] Garp in the spectrum of American white middle-class culture heroes. Tragically, as the force of Phineas's natural superiority impinges on his impressionable roommate, Gene, Gene reacts with panic and an unconscious need to play the part of Judas in Phineas's life. Gene, the narrator of "A Separate Peace," tells the story of his betrayal of his friend with Calvinist conscientiousness, connecting his discovery of the destructive potential in himself with the greater destructiveness of the world conflict.

No wonder the book is a teen classic. Moved by the desire to be like Phineas and the fear of turning out like Gene, the young reader is ravaged; and it's no secret we love best the books that ravage us, particularly in adolescence.

The even more slender "Peace Breaks Out" also takes place at the Devon School, this time in 1946. Again the focus is on the senior class, and again a boy dies when accidental factors combine with the destructive impulses of a classmate. And once again there is a distressing suggestion that herd behavior, so often a part of student life at isolated, sexually segregated schools, contributes to the tragedy. (p. 3)

The story quickly comes to focus on the feuding of two boys—both clever, neither well liked by their classmates—who have clashed from the time of their first encounter in Pete's American history class. Hochschwender, from Wisconsin, professes pro-German sympathies and describes America as "a mongrel country getting bigger and bigger and winning wars because the land they've got is so rich in resources that they can defeat superior countries." This is pretty offensive stuff, but only the self-described "Anglo-Irish" Wexford takes it personally; the rest of the students at least dimly surmise that Hochschwender—who courts their dislike after a weak heart bars him from athletics, the only sure route to popularity at Devon—is likely to grow less obnoxious in time.

But Wexford, who is editor of the school paper, carries his dislike of Hochschwender fatally far. Something of a monster of opportunism and manipulation, Wexford makes the harrying of Hochschwender his principal senior activity and stops at nothing to bring him down, finally desecrating the school chapel and making it appear that it was Hochschwender who smashed the new stained-glass War Memorial window. Of course the intended irony, which works quite convincingly, is that the two boys have a lot in common. Each is an outsider who will never be invited into the inner circle of Devon sports heroes and top boys.

Where the book goes rather askew is in the portrayal of Wexford. He is limned with something like hate; John Knowles dwells obsessively on his physical quirks (such as the way he works his mouth), on his many vices, his dishonesty, his wealthy, cynical, Roosevelt-hating father…. In short, the school editor is presented as too loathsome a hypocrite. Beyond a certain point, we're tempted to cry, "C'mon now! The kid is only 17."

But for John Knowles, Wexford is much more than a creepy schoolboy. With his flair for self-advertisement, his compulsion to manipulate other people, his lack of moral scruples, his utter unlovableness, and, in consequence, his tendency to make dangerous mischief, Wexford may represent one face of the American future. The career of troublemaking begun at Devon in 1946 may well proceed and develop until by the '70s or '80s, the same Wexford, hollowest of hollow men, stalks the corridors of power, putting his awful mouth to the ear of the mighty. Maybe. Yet showing what rotten kids the Wexfords of this world were at school seems something of an exercise in futility. (pp. 3, 37)

There are many good things in "Peace Breaks Out," among them the spare prose and the skillful plotting, which blends the routine and the remarkable to persuade us that a whole year of school has been lived through before Graduation Day. (p. 37)