OVER THE WEEKEND, I finished Richard Marius’s An Affair of Honor, which I found quite gripping, though also somewhat disturbing, if probably in a different way than he intended. Unlike Marius — and whole generations of southern authors — I never grew up on a farm, and though I spent part of my youth in the small town of Maryville, Tennessee, it’s a college town just outside Knoxville and doesn’t count. As a result, I don’t have the love/hate relationship — born in no small part of tortured religious introspection, which the other part of my childhood spent hanging around Harvard Divinity School and observing its denizens immunized me against — necessary to identify with some of the characters’ angst.

Still, a great posthumous book, by a very thoughtful and talented man who was very generous with his time — and even more so, retrospectively, since he turned out to have so little.