In a civilized society, everybody should be allowed a perversion or two, and John Coyne’s is golf. Like others of his persuasion, Coyne’s soul is filled up by knocking a little white ball around a series of lawns with a stick. Coyne was in the same Ethiopia Peace Corps group I was part of back in the Jurassic age — JFK himself bade us farewell one golden summer afternoon on the White House lawn — but I never saw Coyne carrying golf clubs in Addis Ababa. It was heavily populated and hilly.

Now, however, these many years later, Coyne has chosen to flaunt his lifestyle with a vengeance — the man is in his sixties, but I guess it is never too late — and he has produced a novel with a golf-world setting that is suspenseful, rich in the lore of the sport, gracefully written and altogether charming.

The caddie of the title is Jack Handley, whose likable voice carries the novel from 1946 to the present day. A noted historian, Handley is recounting to an assemblage at the Midlothian Country Club near Chicago events of the year Ben Hogan won the Chicago Open on the club’s course. It was also the summer the great golfer and good man helped steer the 14-year-old Handley through a moral and practical minefield involving loyalty and — for a destitute farmboy helping a mother widowed in World War II — making ends meet.

While golf carts have rendered the species largely extinct, a caddie in 1946 was not just the kid who carried a golfer’s bag. He was sometimes a coach and tactician who knew a course’s eccentricities and offered advice on which club to use and how to play a hole. Young Handley is Midlothian’s savviest caddie — knowledgeable, shrewd, politic — and he usually carries for a man he reveres, confident young pro Matt Richardson. When Hogan shows up, however, the master recruits Handley for a practice round. Some of the story’s tension is over who Handley will caddie for in the big match.

A related bitter conflict has to do with social class. Richardson has tumbled happily into a steamy affair with Sarah Dupree, the winsome college-age daughter of the country club’s snooty president. The elder Dupree is dead set against his daughter fooling around with the help, and when he discovers that Handley is serving as a go-between and passing assignation notes for the young lovers, the patriarch is fit to be tied. Some of this is entertainingly farcical, though you have to know that heartbreak is all but inevitable.

The novel is jam-packed with golfer stories, like the one about Gene Sarazen (born Eugenio Saraceni) redesigning his niblick (then called a 9-iron) to resemble the shape of the tail fin on Howard Hughes’ airplane. There are amusing tales of pro golfers’ bad tempers; violently raging Tommy Bolt hurled his putter so often that other players called him “Thunder.“

It is Hogan, though, who is portrayed here most indelibly. As a golfer, the former poor boy from the Texas plains “played a brooding, methodical game.” And such was his grave dedication to perfecting his skills that even when he played with a friend “it was never a friendly game.” Hogan’s life lessons for Handley are at the center of the novel. They have to do with not being intimidated by powerful people when they are wrong, and with moving beyond disappointment. “It’s always the next shot that’s important,” Hogan stresses, and not the one you can’t do over.

Coyne himself is nearly as serious about golf as Hogan was — though he is not so solemn as to keep him from quoting Mark Twain’s comment that golf is “a good walk spoiled.”

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