A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Most of what I knew about A Separate Peace before reading it was that it was one of those 20th century curriculum books like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies that schools like to assign, and that Lisa and Grandma Simpson hate it. I also struggled to see how it fit in with Knowles’ other work until I realized I was mixing him up with John Fowles. That’s what they get for having names that rhyme.

The story takes place at a New England boarding school called Devon during the middle years of World War II. The narrator, Gene Forrester, is a top student who is enamoured with his roommate Phineas, a preternaturally gifted athlete whose breezy way of life and effortless charm make him Gene’s perfect foil. Despite their difference, the two are close friends, though Gene harbours a one-sided resentment of Phineas that festers into a paranoid assumption that his pranks and amusements are intended to undercut Gene’s academic success.

Gene eventually realizes his mistake, but rather than clean the infection, understanding merely drives it deeper, ultimately causing him to knock Phineas out of a tree and cause him a life-altering injury. The rest of the book deal with the consequences of this action. Like the bone in his leg, Phineas’ friendship with Gene reforms in the following, lumpy and misshapen yet in some ways stronger than before. Much is left ambiguous regarding why Gene did what he did, how conscious of an act it was, and to what extent Phineas realizes what happened. He rebuffs Gene’s initial confession and the whole things gets papered over, though later revelations make you question how Phineas really feels.

The book is interesting and well-told, convincingly narrated by an educated man looking back on his life. Perhaps not truly the ninth-grade level for a precocious student, but hardly pre-school.

The Tin Drum - Günter Grass

I feel a little defeated that I didn’t read The Tin Drum in the original German, but I think that would have been a pretty painful experience. The book is dense enough in translation, rife with euphemisms, call-backs, extended metaphors, and narrative cul-de-sacs.

The story is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a man born in Danzig between the World Wars whose growth was stunted (by his own telling, deliberately) at the age of three and whose abiding love for his tin drum is such that attempts to take it from him evoked the power to destroy glass with his screams. The story bounces between Oskar’s present, where he resides in an insane asylum, and his past--or indeed that of his family; he goes back several generations to give familial context.

As one might surmise from the summary, it’s a weird book. A bent and hyper-sexed One Hundred Years of Solitude, complete with the extended family history and magic realism. It’s also quite funny at times. Oskar’s detached and ribald commentary makes for good reading, and I genuinely enjoyed his company, even as I struggled to place names for characters that reemerged after a hundred and fifty pages.

This is not a book where plot is paramount, and there is a whiff of a shaggy dog tale about it, as instances that seem like they may explain his current predicament fizzle into nothing. When you do finally figure out why he’s in the insane asylum, it feels a bit anticlimactic. Still, I enjoyed reading it.

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

I first read The Haunting of Hill House in a larger collection of Shirley Jackson’s work, and while I enjoyed it, it was overshadowed by We Have Always Lived In the Castle, Jackson’s greatest work and, to my eyes, one of the crowning achievements of 20th century literature. But Hill House really is an excellent book, and I was happy to revisit unhappy Eleanor as she undergoes her strange symbiosis with the eponymous building. For that’s how I always interpreted the book: the house found her and knew her for its own and, through its designs, kept her.

Eleanor is masterfully rendered in this book. Jackson creates remarkable characters, but Eleanor may be her crowning achievement, even more than Merricat Blackwood (though Merricat will always be my favourite). Broken by the toil and slow cruelty of an unhappy childhood cap-stoned by her years as her mother’s nursemaid—details revealed only in secondhand snippets, but precise and vivid enough to undergird a novel all their own—Eleanor tumbles from subservience to her mother to subservience to her sister. A letter from Dr. Montague inviting her to participate in a study of the paranormal gives her a chance to escape, and she snatches it with wild abandon.

In a lesser book, Montague would be the villain, his purposes for drawing disparate characters to Hill House convoluted and sinister. But he is actually a sympathetic man struggling to unite the spiritual and empiricist halves of his mind, a longstanding battle that informs his particular, idiosyncratic fascination with the paranormal. The glamorous Theodora, very much a mirror opposite of Eleanor, is the only other invitee to arrive, apart from Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner who is foisted off to keep him out of trouble. The fact that he actually doesn’t need such keeping is another detail a lesser writer would have missed.

Jackson’s characters are not broad. They are complex and troubled and hard to pin down. They bounce form camaraderie to conflict with such rapidity that it can feel shocking, but it all feels earned and natural. There are hints that the house may be manipulating them, but the extent of this is never clear. Even the actions of the ghost—if indeed there is a ghost; I tend to think the spirit is the house itself, birthed in trauma, rather than restless human soul—are opaque despite being realized in great detail (the cold spot is a nice touch, and the phantom hand Eleanor holds in an imagined darkness is one of the sharpest scenes in any horror book). Jackson draws few signposts, and the reader can infer to the best of their ability what exactly causes the final tragic events to unfold.

A neat parallel to We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the arrival of Dr. Montague’s wife, whose pigheaded spiritualism clashes with his own more nuanced take, causing a disruption in line with that of Merricat’s cousin in the later book. Their relationship is magnificently rendered, frosty without any of the cliches that mar depictions of martial strife in many other stories.

Shirley Jackson is one of America’s greatest writers. Had she not somehow excelled herself with Castle, Hill House would be her magnum opus. Any author would be proud to have such a book as their best work. The fact it is only number 2 speaks to her tremendous talent.