Intro: The Saturday Night Live Cold Open

Boy, did we need a break this week. The last three books were massive undertakings—the kind of reading that leaves you blinking at the wall afterward, wondering why you voluntarily buried yourself in this psychic sludge.

It started with William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, a book so deeply dark and airless it practically required a miner’s helmet. Then we followed Toru Okada down into his well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where the drip-drip-drip of the void becomes its own desolate soundtrack. Finally, because apparently we weren’t done courting the abyss, we wandered into The Secret History. In these books, darkness isn’t just something that happens to you; it’s a vocation.

To lighten things up this week, we needed something a little easier—to see if we could survive with someone who wasn’t damaged before they got to college. So we’re going to look at high school. But of course, it’s literature, and you’re visiting this specific location, so it’s clearly not going to turn out well. It doesn’t. Let’s look at John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Part I: Can you mow around cows?

People seem to forget what happens in childhood—the little battles that go on and on, occurring daily. They forget, especially if they were introverted in middle school, the feeling of being picked up by a larger kid with one hand just so he could open the locker with the other and shovel you inside. Eventually, it all fades away. They forget the magazines sitting under their beds that their parents weren’t particularly fond of, either. Everybody eventually reaches an age where they start looking at kids out the window and opening it just to scream—not “Nice catch,” but “Get the hell off my lawn!”

It’s some kind of strange, bizarre age amnesia. Or maybe it’s just the shell adulthood forms around you, whether things go great or not. Even if things go perfectly—you marry that girl you adored in high school, move out West with her, start a ranch with cows, have the 2.5 kids, and are deliriously happy—even you will eventually open the window, see a bunch of kids, and yell: “Get away from my cows! You look a bit drunk and I don’t want you tipping them.”

It’s just a part of life. People forget that everyone had these little battles. Sometimes they’re “stuck-in-a-locker” battles, but sometimes they’re battles with what’s inside. Forgetting them, however, is what leads you to Doom.

Part II: Yes, Jane Austen would be much more fun.

It is a truth universally acknowledged—and no, I’m not playing a practical joke; we’re not going to be talking about Jane Austen and having a blast—that readers prefer first-person narrators. They like someone telling them the story. But that’s a trap, one that talented writers use to their benefit. We learned last week that while Richard in The Secret History admitted he was a murderer, almost everything else he told us afterward was a lie. Here, Gene is giving us directions, but we have to ask: how truthful is he being?

At the beginning of the novel, he is afraid of visiting two places. John Knowles, as we will discover, is not the most subtle writer. Gene is afraid of a tree—a tree that holds the weight of the one in the Garden of Eden—and some marble steps. He hasn’t been physically harmed by either, but they set the dynamic: physical versus mental, inner versus outer.

Gene is the academic, the introverted reader. Finny is the athlete. We don’t know, based on Gene’s account, whether Finny ignores his academics because he’s uninterested or if he’s simply not good at them. Like everyone, Finny wants a best friend, but he wants that friend to do what he wants to do. They can be friends, but it’s going to be difficult if one doesn’t “give.” Unfortunately, one of them does—Gene—and that “giving” happens entirely within his own mind.

Part III: Maybe Tiffany was right and thinking “I Think We’re Alone Now” would be better.

Gene and Finny manage to get along because Gene never challenges him. He never says, “Wait, I want to stop and read.” Why Gene never simply asks for time to study, we don’t know. But in one way, we should be thankful he doesn’t—otherwise, this already slim novel would have been a short story.

Gene is trying to be helpful; even introverts want friends. But his submission is like when your partner pokes you and says, “Put the book down and watch the show with me,” or a doctor pokes you to fill out forms in the waiting room, or your partner pokes you while you’re reading in bed and says, “Let’s have sex now.” You can say no, but your relationship isn’t going to end well. So Gene wants to keep reading, but he puts the book down and does exactly what Finny wants.

Two events define the early days. The first is Blitzball—the stupidest game ever created, even in fiction, because it has no rules. You just throw a ball and tackle people, but nobody who wants the ball actually gets it, and the people who get the ball don’t want it. As I mentioned, Knowles isn’t being subtle: it’s telling us something much larger. We’ll get back to that.

The other event is the tree. All kids like climbing trees, but here, instead of biting the Apple, they decide to reach for it themselves. There is definitely going to be a fall. They form the Suicide Club, the most ironically named club in literature. Nobody will end up killing themselves in it—at least not yet, and not technically. But two people will die by their own hands in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Part IV: What was it that INXS meant about “Suicide Blonde”?

The Suicide Club becomes popular, but it cuts deep into Gene’s study time. So does assisting Finny with his non-academic endeavors. Then Finny breaks the school swimming record when only the two of them are at the pool, and he doesn’t want to tell anyone. Gene finds this fascinating—and terrifying. Is it deep, selfless admiration? Or is it like Henry in The Secret History, saving Richard’s life just to bond with him while actually ensnaring him in a trap? Gene chooses the latter. He suspects sabotage.

This is where the unreliable narrator comes in handy. One person might say, “My partner wants to cuddle after sex because they love me.” Another might say, “My partner wants to cuddle after sex just so I can’t get back to my book.” Does Finny actually want Gene to do well, or is he so wrapped up in his own inner world that he doesn’t have Gene’s best interests at heart?

In the end, it doesn’t matter, because John Knowles is a huge fan of An American Tragedy—just like me. So, let’s talk about that, shall we?

Part V: Did he or didn’t he? Talk about your cheating!

In An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths is obsessed with escape. Raised in a poor, religious family, he eventually stumbles upon a sweet young girl who finds him infectious; they become intimate. Then he meets a rich girl who plays a bit of cat-and-mouse with him, eventually inviting him into her world of wealth and illusion.

When the poor girl informs him she’s pregnant, Clyde’s new world is threatened. He takes her out on a boat with the clear intention to kill her—but things go awry. Did he actually mean to do it? Or did he try to save her when the boat rocked? The brilliance is that you can argue both ways. Despite critics claiming Theodore Dreiser was a “bad” writer from a technical perspective—An American Tragedy is often called the greatest “badly written” novel in existence—he manages to ask the hard question: Once Clyde took her out on that boat, was he already morally bankrupt?

Knowles achieves the same thing. Gene makes the branch move. Does Finny fall accidentally because the branch is rocking? We don’t know, even with Gene telling us. That is the first-person narrator at work. Just because someone tells us something doesn’t mean they know the truth themselves; we only have their interpretation. All we know is that it was an impulsive act. We don’t know how much Gene meant to harm him. What matters is that the branch rocked, Gene was holding the tree, and Finny fell.

Part VI: Who knows? Who cares? Actually, it is kind of important.

Gene visits Finny and tries to apologize, but Finny pushes it away. In his world, his best friend couldn’t possibly have meant to hurt him. The remainder of the book follows Gene feeling morally culpable for the “accident.” Summer turns to fall, and the novel matches the season, becoming colder and more brittle.

Brinker Hadley enters, insisting on order and discipline. Finny demands that Gene “take up the banner” for him regarding sports and begins training him for the Olympics. It’s a shared delusion—a way for Gene to do penance and for Finny to avoid the truth. They grasp each other in a massive bear hug because they know that if they release it, they’ll both be destroyed by the reality of the situation.

Meanwhile, the war is raging on.

You do remember there’s a war going on, right?

Part VII: I really could use an antidepressant.

For the first and only time in the novel, Knowles attempts humor. It’s the one thing he hasn’t unveiled up to this point. He also seems to be a fan of the Catch-22 logic. He sends Leper Lepellier—the school’s gentle outlier—off to the war after the boy sees a recruitment film for the ski troops. You might actually laugh in a way you wouldn’t have earlier in the novel, simply because Knowles doesn’t usually “do” humor. Even if the author meant it seriously, it’s so bizarre that it reads as a dark joke dropping out of nowhere.

This leads us into the arrival of deep winter. There is a brief respite before the damage starts to unravel: the Winter Carnival, a simple, shared world of joy and rebellion. But then it turns bitter. The sense of humor vanishes, and the telegram arrives: I have escaped and I need help.

Tell me about it.

When Gene visits Leper, we get a clear indication of the society they live in. It’s still pretty much the same society Knowles was writing about back then. Leper is mentally unraveling, seeing hallucinations. The military wants to dismiss him under Section 8. While technically a discharge for mental illness, society at that time viewed it as making a man “unemployable.” It was essentially worse than a dishonorable discharge. Violating military rules or committing a war crime—which would bring you a trial—was somehow seen as less problematic than having mental health issues as a result of the war. Talk about your Catch-22.

It feels like things haven’t really changed that much. But thankfully, they have. Mental health issues are much more appreciated now and supported without stigma. I mean… aren’t they?

Part VIII: I messed up, you’re messed up. Everybody’s messed up in this place.

Leper accuses Gene of being a “savage underneath”—an irony coming from a kid who spent the war looking at beaver dams. But Gene can’t face that truth. Like the characters in The Secret History, he has a moral rot. Once more, we reach the place where “the center cannot hold.” It hasn’t gone well in the previous three books, and it doesn’t here, either.

Brinker pushes for a reckoning—a ridiculous kangaroo trial in the assembly room. Gene’s denial collapses, and with it, Finny’s ability to accept the fall as an accident. Finny storms out, falls on the marble stairs, and re-breaks his leg.

In the infirmary, his haunting “Why?” echoes throughout the novel. That question penetrates everything. We discover that when dealing with the shadows, those questions are all too common. You realize then that Finny wasn’t competing; sports were just his way of trying to keep living.

In this moment, the term “Blood Brothers” has never meant more.

Part IX: Blitzball is still a stupid fucking game.

Finny goes into surgery to repair the fracture, and bone marrow slips into his heart. The less-than-subtle Knowles has returned: Finny dies, bringing a new, literal meaning to the term “Blood Brothers.” The war finally arrives at Devon—which is what the novel was actually about all along. Just like that stupid Blitzball game, there are no winners and no losers. Not in war, not in mental illness, and sometimes, not even in friendship.

Brinker’s father arrives to lecture the boys—one of the great irritants in literature—having fully succumbed to the Age Amnesia mentioned earlier with his absurd dictations on “honor.” The boys have already learned that Gene’s war with Finny was pointless.

No survivor can ever allow themselves to be swallowed up completely by the shadows. It always ends in destruction.

Next Week: we’ll find out that keeping things “light” doesn’t make it any easier to walk through the darkness. We’ll see what happens when a novelist knows a bit too much about their source material as we look at Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. We’ll see if I can get through the entire essay without making an appliance joke.

Really, what are the odds?

Onward.