A story of the peacetime military and the challenges to manhood and honor that its rigid code of morals creates. Dubus said that after he wrote this novel someone introduced him to Anton Chekhov's stories, and he threw away the manuscript of his next novel and began writing short fiction -- of which he became one of our most acclaimed and accomplished practitioners, a "writer's writer" who was admired as a model and a mentor by many authors whose fame outstripped his own.