Sparta: A Novel - Hardcover

Robinson, Roxana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374267707 ISBN 13: 9780374267704

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013

Synopsis

Going from peace to war can make a young man into a warrior. Going from war to peace can destroy him.

Conrad Farrell has no family military heritage, but as a classics major at Williams College, he has encountered the powerful appeal of the Marine Corps ethic. "Semper Fidelis" comes straight from the ancient world, from Sparta, where every citizen doubled as a full-time soldier. When Conrad graduates, he joins the Marines to continue a long tradition of honor, courage, and commitment.

As Roxana Robinson's new novel, Sparta, begins, Conrad has just returned home to Katonah, New York, after four years in Iraq, and he's beginning to learn that something has changed in his landscape. Something has gone wrong, though things should be fine: he hasn't been shot or wounded; he's never had psychological troubles--he shouldn't have PTSD. But as he attempts to reconnect with his family and his girlfriend and to find his footing in the civilian world, he learns how hard it is to return to the people and places he used to love. His life becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate: he can't imagine his future, can't recover his past, and can't bring himself to occupy his present. As weeks turn into months, Conrad feels himself trapped in a life that's constrictive and incomprehensible, and he fears that his growing rage will have irreparable consequences.

Suspenseful, compassionate, and perceptive, Sparta captures the nuances of the unique estrangement that modern soldiers face as they attempt to rejoin the society they've fought for. Billy Collins writes that Roxana Robinson is "a master at . . . the work of excavating the truths about ourselves"; The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley calls her "one of our best writers." In Sparta, with the powerful insight and acuity that marked her earlier books (Cost, Sweetwater, and A Perfect Stranger, among others), Robinson explores the life of a veteran and delivers her best book yet.
A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2013

About this title

About the Author

Roxana Robinson is the author of four previous novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, More, and Vogue, among other publications.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Robinson tells tales of psychic maladies with spellbinding intensity and acute insight. In Cost (2008), she explored drug addiction; here, she occupies the PTSD-assaulted mind of an Iraq War veteran. Conrad had everything going for him as the oldest child in a loving and achieving Westchester County family. Smart, handsome, poised, and enthralled by his college studies as a classics major, he decides to seek his own Sparta by joining the marines, thus shocking his “bookish and liberal” parents. A kind and devoted officer, Conrad is appalled to find himself not in a noble and orderly military realm but, rather, in a morass of chaos, terror, futility, and crimes against humanity. Safely home at last, he is determined to restart his life, but all his discipline and training prove worthless in contending with searing insomnia, debilitating headaches, and ungovernable anger, fear, and hypervigilance. A war hero who now feels threatened in his boyhood bedroom, let alone on the jostling, hurrying streets of New York City, Conrad seeks treatment from the VA only to become ensnarled in another form of combat. Robinson’s diligently researched and profoundly realized tale of a warrior’s trauma and his family’s struggle to help him is a beautifully incisive, respectful, suspenseful, and indicting drama of our failure to grasp the full toll of war. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374267707
• ISBN 13: 9780374267704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400