The Volunteer
A Novel
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3.9 • 17 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"Thrilling… Scibona has built a masterpiece." – The New York Times Book Review
"All of it — all of it — is just so ridiculously beautiful." – Jason Sheehan, NPR.org
"The rewards are enormous. This is a spectacular work of fiction." – San Francisco Chronicle
A long-awaited new novel from a National Book Award Finalist, the epic story of a restless young man who is captured during the Vietnam War and pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the United States government
A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning.
With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style, Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are capable of both inventing and discovering our true families and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scibona's spirited second novel (after 2008 National Book Award Finalist The End) begins in 2010 as a man abandons a child at the Hamburg-Fuhlsbuttel airport. The story then flashes back to the late 1960s as underage Iowan Vollie Frade volunteers for the Marines. While serving in Vietnam, he meets mystery man Percy Lorch, who recruits him for an unnamed government spook operation. Vollie's assignment is to move to Queens to verify whether a man named Egon Hausmann is dead. But after six months, fed up with his covert masters' veil of secrecy, Vollie escapes from Queens and heads for New Mexico, where he disappears into a free love commune. There he finds a wife, the free-spirited Louisa, and young son, Elroy Heflin, a child of the commune. But Vollie ends up abandoning his makeshift family after a stint as a barbed wire inspector. Elroy goes on to see action during several tours of duty in Afghanistan while fathering and abandoning a child of his own. The story ultimately comes back to Vollie, who finds that he can't escape the bad decisions of his past. Like the late Robert Stone, Scibona exhibits a command of language and demonstrates a knack for dramatizing the tidal pull of history on individual destiny. The novel accrues real power as its vividly imagined characters try to make sense of an often senseless world. This is a bold, rewarding novel.
Customer Reviews
Tedious and exhausting to read
Having read and heard many glowing reviews and accolades, I was excited to recommend for my reading group. The consensus....a resounding thumbs down by all. Most didn’t even finish (I only did to find out what happened to the boy). Only two points in the book were interesting, the opening and when Vollie is captured. The rest was a tiresome and depressing slog.
The best character was Mavis...the dog