Word: wexfords
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...INTEREST of A Separate Peace lies in the subtle irony of friends trapped in hatred. In Peace Breaks Out, the protagonists are bitter foes from the outset. Hochschwender, the loud, obnoxious neo-Nazi, and Wexford, the pathologically evil, power-obsessed editor of the school newspaper, emerge from the first meeting of their American History class determined to destroy each other. The reader can identify with neither character, and their rivalry quickly becomes trivial and boring...
...History teacher, Pete Hallam, presides over the conflict, commenting periodically on its progress. A wise but bitter former POW. Hallam tries to recapture the innocence he knew at Devon as a student but finds the same violence he thought he had escaped. Instead of adding depth to the Hochschwender Wexford confrontation, his observations reduce the action to a series of cliches. Reflecting on "that monster war," Hallam sees it "sending last thin even here to this still reverberating around the world even here to this little rural corner...
...place of subtlety and effective characterization, Knowles substitutes irrelevant plot contrivances. Inconclusive innuendos concerning Wexford's latent homosexuality are included, as are sporadic references to Hallam's ex-wife, the reason for the breakup and their eventual reconcilliation...
...drama, now replayed by thousands of Cubans in their 110-mile trek across the Straits of Florida, can still raise a glow of patriotic nostalgia in Americans. It is "a nation of immigrants," after all, as John Kennedy wrote 100 years after his Irish great-grandfather left County Wexford to become a cooper in Boston. But today Americans are having trouble rising to the occasion. Drifting into a recession whose depths they cannot yet judge, skittish about plant closings and lost jobs, about oil prices and taxes that already seem too high for Government services that provide too little, Americans...