Sparta by Roxana Robinson

Wow! This author has taken on a huge and risky task: writing a fictional memoir, putting herself in the head of a Marine officer, a returning Iraq war vet

O.K.

Does she get into his head?

This is what it’s all about.

No.!  I don’t think so.  And she, Roxana the author, has to, or this isn’t really a “novel” at all; maybe only an overdone weekly supplement article.

It is suspension of disbelief that fiction is all about.  It’s the creation of a writer’s mind.  If it’s not, it might be great research, a journalistic success and a wonderful story for a monthly or an in-depth TV study, but it’s not a fictional novel.

Roxana tries too hard, and paints a passable picture of Conrad’s problems from the Mom’s point of view; the sister’s point of view; even the girl-friend’s point of view.

And all for naught.  It might have been a more valiant offering if there had been a developed dad’s point of view and/or the brother’s point of view, mysteriously missing until the end, where an entire life shifts after 380 pages, right on the very last page.  If she’d balanced the story with male characters, then it might have become more of a dramatic novel, but I’m thinking, that would have been too much for Roxana to handle.

This was clearly a single message story – PTSD is real and it sucks.

So again, the author doesn’t suspend my disbelief.  As I read the thoughts of Marine Lieutenant Conrad Farrell, I didn’t believe his character.  It’s not that I question the facts: the episodic fears; the rage, the psychedelic time & space shifting of the modern world.

The author took all these well-researched episodic, symptomatic behaviors and repeated them, in scenes, again and again.  It became word filler for the weary reader – we got the point in the first few pages.  There was nothing new to offer here – the generic PTSD story has been well-documented and extensively written about.  That’s not to say that the public ever tires of war stories – they’re still making movies about WW-II.

The need for psychiatric care is obvious to all around, but missed by everyone with whom he comes into contact.  Wouldn’t somebody along his year-long pathway give him a handful of Prozac?  If I mention the words: “nervous”, “anxious”, when I’m at Kaiser; there’s a prescription in my hand without me even asking.