“I remember this book distinctly because seldom have I hated a book more. In addition to being a depressing piece of work, it is about as relevant to kids today as a 45RPM single (That’s something we had before CDs, boys and girls Oh, and CDs were what we had before streaming). Why are they still putting it on reading lists? What fan of John Knowles has been paying teachers to force this on the kids?”
– The Library Lady, via GoodReads, June 4, 2024.
Immediately after reading John Knowles’ A Separate Peace last week, I read this review left by a very opinionated GoodReads user. It left me sort of mad, but mostly heartbroken. It left me crafting rebuttals and hurling them at my shower wall. So, as a young writer, a student of literature, a simple person with a blog, and a body with a brain and fingers to write with, I feel it is my duty to engage with this idea that A Separate Peace “is about as relevant to kids today as a 45RPM single,” which, though my friends and I do actually listen to records, I guess is to say, it’s irrelevant to the youth.
For context, A Separate Peace is a book about remorse and forgiveness, set against a nation descending into World War II, with all the looming fear, loss of autonomy, and bleak mortality that awakens in the young boys who are about to inherit it. Most readers, if GoodReads comments are any indication, glean a story about the jealousy-induced isolation of adolescence, but I can’t help but read it through the lens of the global conditions that guide the novel. However it’s interpreted, I refuse to believe it’s at all irrelevant to youth today, maybe aside from the fact that it’s a physical novel, not split into 50 tiktoks with Subway Surfers gameplay in the corner. (Is that what likens it to “a 45RPM single?”)
And maybe aside from the fact that warfare is not so physical and personal these days. Knowles would not recognize the way America wages war by proxy, with the help of the AI technology that is harnessed by our continued attention, crafted by our exploited work, and driven by the movement of our fingertips. But that’s precisely what makes A Separate Peace so relevant to youth today. No matter the form, this exploitation has always existed. And no matter the practice – athletics, art, philosophy, science, stoned Sunday blog-writing – it has always been made beautiful by the autonomy and purity put into the practice.
Nothing demonstrates this as well as Chapter 3, when Gene recollects Finny’s athletic achievements. “In such a period no one notices or awards any achievements involving the body unless the result is to kill it or save it on the battlefield,” he says. In Gene’s memory, the two boys are alone, hanging out at the Devon School Swimming Pool, when Finny decides to try and beat the record for fastest 100 Yard Free Style. When he beats it by seven milliseconds, Gene immediately laments the fact that it “won’t count” because there weren’t any witnesses around, and because he isn’t “an official timekeeper.” Finny casually replies, “Well of course it won’t count,” insisting that he won’t do it again for an audience or for an award. Narrator Gene goes over this in his mind, and lands on this conclusion: “It made Finny seem too unusual for– not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry.”
In this scene, Finny performs this athletic feat purely for his own satisfaction and enjoyment. It is not to win, or to fight, or to prove anything. It is an autonomous act of athleticism, devoid from any sense of rivalry, and unaffected completely by the pressures that turn young boys into soldiers. The body is beautiful when it acts apart from control and exploitation. While this young Gene of the narrator’s memory resents that Finny’s athletic talents should be wasted, Finny seems to know that action for its own sake is not a waste, it is empowerment.
If you speak to young artists, you will quickly learn that there’s a common depression and dissatisfaction caused by the world they are inheriting. There’s a special pain to knowing that any craft you undertake will have unintended consequences, as long as you want others to have access to it. Everything is connected, so everything is compromised. Uploading your photography to Instagram allows Meta AI to devour it. You can’t put a zine online without Issuu AI formatting and dissecting it. You can’t opt out of Scribd generating an AI description of your poetry. You can’t open a Google Doc without Gemini lurking on every word. You can’t put your music on Spotify unless you want to help Daniel Ek build AI weapons. And though I write this blog for the joy of writing, I’m certain that it’s helping some WordPress bot exploit my humanity for its replication. We can never be certain that our art is pure. And though artists have found creative ways to minimize interaction with AI and maximize interaction with other people, detailing these solutions is not the aim of this blog post. AI is everywhere, and there is too much complacency to avoid it even if you never touch a chat bot.
In A Separate Peace, as much as Gene wishes Finny would use his athletic ability for victory, for rivalry, for war, Finny refuses. It’s a meaningful rebellion during World War II, when the rest of their peers are obsessed with enlisting, as their elite school is a feeding tube straight to the military. It’s unusual that in this time of armed conflict, reliant on people power, Finny should use his abilities to empower only himself. Now, in the midst of the AI arms race, young people wish that detachment was a possibility. That’s precisely why it’s out of touch to claim that A Separate Peace is irrelevant to the youth. Though times change, government exploitation never does. And it’s ridiculous to criticize it on the basis that it’s “depressing,” when AI companies are manufacturing the depression of our time: genocide, surveillance, the affordability crisis, the dwindling job market, the literacy decline. Real human literature, like A Separate Peace, has always spoken to that depression. I can only hope it will continue to.
In my next post, I’ll respond to The Library Lady’s review of Skippyjon Jones, where she says that “There is something very, very,VERY wrong with a cat who wants to pretend he is a dog.”
See you then.
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