A novel that gives a history lesson

Sparta

A Novel

By Roxana Robinson

Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp. $27

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Reviewed by Abby Frucht

Roxana Robinson's 2008 novel, Cost, tells the story of 22-year-old Jack Lambert's heroin addiction and the cost, both material and otherwise, it exacted on his mother, Julia.

Feeling that she needs to "be everywhere, all the time . . . pulse thrumming," Julia follows Jack along the awful spiral of his illness, clinging to the brightness and vitality of his hair even as he takes her to the darkest places imaginable. Though a mother's strength can't save her children from the forces within them, Julia's clear, determined eye and rational emotions made compelling company for Robinson's reader.

Readers of Robinson's new novel, Sparta, might miss Julia, since in her place is the simpering Lydia, mother of Conrad Farrell, a young Marine whose return home from Iraq finds him at odds with the bucolic, bookish environs of his upbringing. A mere walk down a summer street evokes Conrad's ire at the sight of Americans sucking their bottles of water, ignorant of the sand-clogged thirst that would plague them were they in Iraq, and the sight of a casual subway rider enjoying an iPod elicits in Conrad a misplaced rage - rage that goes outward only to tunnel more violently inward.

That Conrad has PTSD is evident from Sparta's opening, and in the pages that follow, the explosions, losses, and terrors that caused it are revealed to the reader via a lyrical disorder that is far more accessible to readers than to Conrad's loved ones: Even his smart girlfriend, Claire, whose remoteness is matched by Conrad's reluctance to talk about his symptoms, appears contentedly oblivious to the depth of his suffering.

Meanwhile, Lydia becomes every mother's nightmare of her least effectual self. Her pushy desperation only sends Conrad nearer his own undoing. It's not fair, the forces - war, illness, the paradox of motherhood - that join hands against Lydia's doomed rescue of her son. But the problem here is the absence of characters who, like Julia of Cost, would be strong enough to carry the weight of PTSD and still remain flesh and blood.

Certainly, Robinson has done her research. The tasteless jokes and song lyrics of today's U.S. military, the bad food, the petty cruelties and their more enduring counterparts, the Iraqi landscape and climate, the insufficient armor, the components of IEDs and other modern weaponries, form this book's arsenal. If Robinson's exhaustive exposition of them makes us wonder whether she was as determined to write an encyclopedia as to write a novel, that's partly because one of her strengths is to describe things so insistently that they speak, think, and feel for themselves.

When Conrad enters that subway car, we, too, experience everything in it, down to the "heavy black woman in a pink jogging suit . . . reading a magazine," and when Conrad picks up that magazine, we see the story about "a hiker who'd been lost on a mountainside for six days and given up for dead," and then we see the "headshot of the terrier, ears pricked, nose raised," who found him.

By the time Sparta's readers put down this novel, they'll know the immorality of war (as well of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) so well that when they go out to dinner the following night, they, like Conrad, might be thrown into a panic if they are seated with their backs to the kitchen door, or when a car backfires, or if somebody drops a tray.

Can Robinson be forgiven for filling half a chapter with a Britannica-style history lesson about the occupation of Fallujah? Of course. But is Sparta a novel, or is the vivid objectivity it brings to PTSD and to the world Conrad lives in too much for him and his loved ones to shoulder and still be compelling flesh and blood characters?

The Greek warrior state of Sparta "failed because the energies of the state were directed only toward war," Robinson writes. "Robbed of its young men . . . it had no heart from which to draw sustenance." This novel does have a heart, but it's not the kind of heart that can sustain a work of fiction.

Still, Robinson cares deeply about war and its fallout, and for those of us readers who are disinclined to pick up the next Thomas Friedman, Sparta will teach us what we should know.