John Knowles's first book, "A Separate Peace," was one of those legendary adolescent novels, passed hand to hand around the dormitories at Groton, buoyed into successive paperback editions by that most valuable of commercial assets, an underground reputation. It was a very special book, about a special type of Eastern prep-school kid, and it was notable for two qualities: a complete absence of humor and a curious air of self-seriousness, as if it had been composed in the service of a 16-year-old boy's romantic self-image. "A Separate Peace" was a schoolboy tragedy seen entirely in schoolboy's terms. Its protagonist was the classic prep-school hero, a sort of eccentric Hobie Baker, innocent, straight, the victim of someone else's destructive complexity. For all its tragedy and blood-guilt, Knowles's first novel was squarely in the tradition of Dink Stover and the Boys Own Paper. Like many cult books, its success derived from a perfect coincidence between an author's preoccupation and that of his audience.

Knowles subsequently published two novels and a travel book ["Double Vision"]. The novels were as humorless and as self-important as "A Separate Peace"; neither had its mystique, and certainly neither had its success. His new book ["Phineas"], a collection of six stories which one hopes was put together at his publisher's insistence, exhibits the same weaknesses as well as a certain sense of reprise.

The title story is actually an old sketch from which "A Separate Peace" was ultimately developed, outlining the themes of the novel and its initial action, but stopping short of the final confrontation and tragedy. And there is another Devon School story, a sidelong glance at another schoolboy tragedy, which has virtually the same plot as Fitzgerald's "The Freshest Boy" except that in Knowles's version the young misfit dies.

The rest of the collection deals with what I suppose might be called the author's central theme, personal insecurity and the fear of displacement…. All of them are accurately, if conventionally motivated and oddly, though unobtrusively, self-important. None of them is memorable.

The difficulty is not that Knowles writes badly; it is that he is essentially a writer of sub-New Yorker stories who once wrote a novel that found a response. That novel was not especially contemporary, although it could be called timeless…. But the people who read it grew up and found other preoccupations, while Knowles's preoccupations remained the same. The adolescent's sense of his own significance cannot be expected to serve a great many situations.