But there were, and are, parts of the school’s culture and history that give me pause and have cost me sleep. For instance: until recently, outside the school’s library stood a statue of Sam Davis, the “Boy Hero of the Confederacy,” who attended the Western Military Institute, which closed in 1867 and became absorbed into the newly chartered Montgomery Bell Academy. For many years, Sam Davis has been one of Tennessee’s most notorious symbols of the Lost Cause myth. Just this past summer, thanks to the efforts of some of my former students, the school voluntarily removed the statue. It was a decision that to many seemed late in the making but that is representative of the larger cultural challenge we face: separating those parts of our history and tradition worth holding on to from those that contradict our progress toward a fairer, more inclusive future. In this moment of cultural awakening, removing monuments or renaming buildings associated with the more ignoble parts of our history is a small but meaningful gesture. Purging the legacy of what they represent, however, is a more complex problem.

Contradiction and complexity: these are the themes of The Fortunate Ones, a story told by Charlie Boykin, a boy from the less affluent side of Nashville who, in the mid-1980s, finds his way to a school much like Montgomery Bell and befriends an extraordinarily gifted and charismatic son of privilege named Archer Creigh. The novel begins in 2012, when Charlie learns that Arch, now a US senator, has committed suicide. We learn how Charlie came to meet Arch and become absorbed into the world of Nashville’s upper class, a world defined both by tremendous affluence and the perilous tension between noblesse oblige and entitlement.

Through Charlie, we see both the glamorous allure of wealth and the moral rot that can infect even the most noble of the fortunate ones when they are raised to assume that those who have everything can get away with anything. We see in Arch a person who is not good or bad, but good and bad. We see how beauty and power seduces both those who are near it and those who possess it, and how the confi dence that comes along with privilege translates into certainty. As Charlie says, “There is nothing in this world to which people connect more willingly in uncertain times than the appearance of genuine certainty. If there was one true thing that could be said about Arch, it was this: he seemed so sure of himself that people couldn’t help but believe in him.”