The Lords of Discipline is Conroy's rendering of life in an institution whose mission is the making of men—or rather, the making of men and the breaking, deliberate and absolute, of those boys who fail to measure up.

What Conroy has achieved is twofold; his book is at once a suspense-ridden duel between conflicting ideals of manhood and a paean to brother love that ends in betrayal and death. Out of the shards of broken friendship a blunted triumph emerges, and it is here, when the duel is won, that the reader finally comprehends the terrible price that any form of manhood can exact. Conroy's personal triumph is in conveying all this in a novel that virtually quivers with excitement and conviction.

The story centers on four senior cadets who have roomed together since their plebe year: Mark Santoro and Dante "Pig" Pignetti, physical specimens of Italian descent from up north; Tradd St. Croix, "the honey prince," effete young aristocrat from the cobwebs of old Charleston; and the narrator, Will McLean, awkward, self-conscious, rebellious, and sharp-tongued, a low-born Irish cracker too sensitive to play Southern military man with much enthusiasm….

The Institute is about to get its first black cadet, and as the year begins the commandant gives Will the unofficial assignment of making sure he gets through his plebe year without being castrated, lynched, or worse…. Soon after the grotesque breaking-in period (known as cadre) gets underway he assumes responsibility for another plebe as well, a fat-faced Carolina boy named Poteete who has the misfortune to be perceived as a crybaby. It is Poteete's spectacular breakdown and almost anticlimactic suicide that set Will on his pursuit of the shadowy brotherhood known as the Ten.

The Ten is a secret mafia whose existence has long been rumored but never proven, a silent and malevolent force dedicated (or so it is said) to maintaining the purity of the Institute—racial purity included. For Will, they become the insubstantial embodiment of all evil, the ultimate perversion of power. But though they provide the impetus that propels the four roommates headlong into disaster, thematically they seem almost superfluous. For The Lords of Discipline is not simply about the abuse of power by a few; it is about the allure power holds for everyone, the weak most of all.

Will's clash with the Ten, though it makes for compelling reading, soon develops the unlikely thrill quotient of a Hardy Boys adventure, but his clash with the idea of discipline is recounted with gravity and passion and style. (p. 11)

Conroy does not neglect the perverse sexuality that the lust for mastery implies: "His lips touched against my ear in a malignant parody of a kiss," Will informs us after he's been anally threatened by a cadre officer's swagger stick during the induction known as Hell Night….

As with the Spartans, however, the ritual violation of boys is not without purpose: Will goes on to cite the birth of "a malignant virility" in the hearts of plebes that night, a virility they would come to use against future boys on this same quadrangle. Conroy's dispute is with this idea of virility. His is a harsh judgment, stunningly rendered. But he does not reject all he has learned, for he is a Southerner and no Southerner can escape his upbringing entirely. A sense of brotherhood is implanted on the quadrangle as well, and it is not coincidental that his narrator's most terrible moments occur at the end, when Will takes on the Ten and the code of brotherhood is betrayed. Love your friends, Conroy warns; they are all that matters.

Will bears an uncommon resemblance to Ben Meecham, the Marine brat and high-school basketball star who bests his father and, in a moment of supreme Oedipal fulfillment, drives off with his mother and siblings in The Great Santini, Conroy's autobiographical first novel. There are times, in fact, when Will's tale sounds less like a work of fiction than like an anguished cry from the heart—except, of course, that it is so tightly bridled, Conroy having learned well the importance of order and mystery and control, those ideas which stand at the center of the military mystique. The problem with Conroy is that he has seen too well, learned too much. "A Southern man is incomplete without a tenure under military rule," Will tells us in the prologue. "I am not an incomplete Southern man. I am simply damaged good, like all the rest of them." (p. 13)