Sparta

April 15, 2013
Robinson’s fifth novel (following Cost) is a detailed examination of the inner life of a Marine returning home after combat. Classics scholar Conrad Farrell, wanting to do “something big,” enlists in the belief that, as a soldier, he will be continuing a tradition going back to the ancient world. Following officer training at Quantico, Va., and four years of service in Iraq, he finds coming back to his family in Westchester, N.Y., a disorienting experience. He can’t get used to the safety of civilian life and struggles to reconnect with his family and his girlfriend, Claire, feeling overcome by rage at unexpected moments. He stays in contact, though, with the men who served under him. Suspecting that he’s suffering from PTSD, Conrad contacts the VA, but his needs are ignored again and again. Robinson brings us deep inside Conrad’s soul, and inside the suffocating despair and frustration that can stalk soldiers even when they are ostensibly out of harm’s way. By letting the reader live in Conrad’s skin, Robinson creates a moving chronicle of how we fail our returning troops. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit.

May 1, 2013
A Marine commander returns home from Iraq badly shaken in this novel, which wears its heart--and its research--on its sleeve. Conrad entered the Marines shortly before 9/11 with an ambition to do something big: He studied Greek military history in college, admiring the discipline of city-states like Sparta (hence the title) but neglecting that place's undercurrent of hubris. Returning home after two tours in Iraq to his sturdily middle-class family outside New York, Conrad is incapable of shaking off his experience. Loud noises snap him into fighting mode; suburban buildings and trains appear to him as easy targets; and simple conversations with his family and his on-again, off-again girlfriend become torments. Robinson (Cost, 2009, etc.) consulted with Iraq War vets and a stack of books to construct Conrad, and she is masterful at capturing the various ways that language fails to depict the misery of PTSD; she subtly shows how everything from emails to prescription information sheets to official forms offer ways to only talk around the problem. Conrad struggles to find his footing in the months after his return, gamely preparing for grad school and reconnecting with college friends, but he slowly slips off the rails as he begins to self-medicate. Between the detailed flashbacks of wartime violence and the visions of stateside anxiety, Robinson has convincingly summarized the wartime experience, but only rarely does it feel like she's made a full person out of Conrad, who has the distant feel of an Everyvet; his interest in Greek history comes across as more a convenient metaphor than character shading. As Conrad's decline accelerates, Robinson hurries the pace of the closing chapters, undoing the fictional rhythms of a book that at times has the declamatory tone of a nonfiction study. A well-intentioned but flawed exploration of an underdiscussed topic.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 15, 2013
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2013

Home from Iraq, Conrad Farrell can't adjust and is getting very, very angry. A key topic from the ever apt Robinson.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013

In Return of the Soldier, published in 1918, Rebecca West introduced the world to the trauma experienced by World War I soldiers. Almost 100 years later, Robinson (A Perfect Stranger) continues this literary tradition with the story of Conrad Farrell, an Iraq War veteran readjusting to life in Westchester, NY. Though he comes home a hero, Conrad finds his world slowly unraveling as headaches, anger, and depression prevent him from connecting to a life he once knew. At the same time, through a series of flashbacks to Iraq, Conrad's memories shift from acts of bravery to an understanding of himself as a victim. Fundamentally disconnected from himself and the people he loves, Conrad begins to grasp the unfathomable realism of trauma. VERDICT Robinson pens a raw portrayal of soldiers returning from modern warfare, attempting to represent the complexity of the traumatic experience without neglecting the horrifying truth. Readers who appreciated Rodge Glass's Dougie's War will also be drawn to this novel. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/12.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.