Almost any literary work that seeks to recover lost time, especially the lost time that is childhood, might be considered a literary precedent for Lightning Bug. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927); Vladimir Nabokov's memoir Speak, Memory (1966); Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1913; translated as The Wanderer), a novel about the finding of a magic place that is lost and cannot be found again. The one book, however, that Harington seemed to have in mind when planning Lightning Bug, is James Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family (1957), especially its opening section "Knoxville: 1915," with its tender evocation of a family, together, out on the lawn enjoying each other and the sounds of a Southern summer night.

Both Agee's and Harington's novels focus on the loss of the sense of wholeness, of love, that for them characterized the essence of "Childhood." In Agee's work this loss is...