birchmark
Thomas Michelson is a student at a midwestern seminary in the 1990s. Unsure of his calling, and even more unsure about relationships with women, he finds his world upended when he reads Tess of the d'Urbervilles for one of his classes, and finds that the young woman he is dating reminds him of Thomas Hardy's heroine.
Vowing to not repeat the plot of Tess, he stumbles into his own Hardyesque tragedy, while his friends, who are also reporting on Hardy novels, follow similar paths.