The Lords of Discipline in The Prince of Prose: A Pat Conroy Appreciation Group

Jun 27, 2016 Claire Fullerton rated it it was amazing

Pat Conroy has been my favorite author since I read and re-read "The Prince of Tides," followed by "Beach Music," "South of Broad," and all of his others. What I've come to realize is Conroy has been the master of voice since the inception of his literary career. His is language mastered in fluid, conversational prose sprung from his command of vocabulary. He's the kind of descriptive writer that weaves in what he's thinking and feeling throughout the story, and in so doing, gives you permission Pat Conroy has been my favorite author since I read and re-read "The Prince of Tides," followed by "Beach Music," "South of Broad," and all of his others. What I've come to realize is Conroy has been the master of voice since the inception of his literary career. His is language mastered in fluid, conversational prose sprung from his command of vocabulary. He's the kind of descriptive writer that weaves in what he's thinking and feeling throughout the story, and in so doing, gives you permission to identify and embrace your own humanity. His books are commentaries on life and the way we wade through it, and he constructs them relentlessly through the nuances of case and point. Typically, Conroy's narrators are outsiders going through the isolated motions of trying to fit into the unbalanced premise of the story. The Lords of Discipline is such an example, when Will McLean walks into his fourth year as a cadet of a South Carolina military academy called The Institute. By this time, Will McLean is a confirmed nonconformist, in it but not of the regiments of this insular college dedicated to beating into its attendees the soul-crushing, disciplinary rules of The Institute, where the cadets subsume their own identity in favor of fitting into the system, which tears them apart before it puts them back together. In flashback, Conroy takes the reader through every step of The Institutes plebe system, where bewildered novices are captive in what is a brutal but sanctioned game of survival. And all around are well-drawn, malicious characters running the show; they are the cadets who have survived the plebe system and are now hell-bent on inflicting the same misery upon freshmen who are inductees into a type of consciousness aimed at making men out of boys. In the midst of this paradigm, Will McLean becomes a member of a brotherhood comprised of himself and his three roommates. They create a cooperative world within a world in a bond that will forever sustain them. In a wider sense, The Lords of Discipline is both metaphoric and axiomatic of the larger truths of life, wherein the inflexible demands of society threatens individuality, or else. Will McLean enters the process with innocence that scratches its way to a wisdom that knows how to game the system. His is a triumphant coming of age in a jeopardous environment that lends a frame of reference for the rest of his life. And just as in life, it's not what you say, but how you say it, and Conroy is the master of this. There is not a weak sentence in this spell-binding book; it handles craft and language and story so seamlessly as to be, yet again, another Conroy classic. ...more

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