[A Separate Peace, Knowles's] excellent first novel, is remarkable not only for the virtues it possesses but for the faults it lacks. There is little of the melodrama customary in books about adolescence. There is no Wolfeian confluence of the literary and the pituitary—the youthful poet growing an inch a month on a diet of a book a day. The author is no more sentimental or romantic about his hero than Stephen Crane was about the protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage. The books are similar in kind and (to a considerable extent) in quality: Author Crane's young soldier had to endure the discovery of fear, and Author Knowles's schoolboy must face the discovery of hatred—a bitter and homicidal knot of hatred in himself. (p. 96)

To insist on a single explication for a book as subtle and brilliant as Author Knowles's would be idle. But one of the things the novelist seems to be saying is that the enemy Gene killed, and loved, is the one every man must kill: his own youth, the innocence that burns too hotly to be endured. (p. 98)