The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

Overview

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and Refinery29

On the outskirts of Baghdad, Lieutenant Emma Fowler’s platoon unwittingly rolls into a buried maze of IEDs—and their Humvee is blasted into a shrapnel-torn wreck.

From this catastrophic moment, The Good Lieutenant unspools backward in time as Fowler and her platoon are guided into disaster by suspicious informants and questionable intelligence, their mission the result of a previous snafu in which a soldier was kidnapped by insurgents. The novel unfolds from points of view that are not customarily included in war coverage—a tenacious female officer, jaded career soldiers, and Iraqis both innocent and not so innocent.

Brilliantly told by an acclaimed writer at the top of his form, Whitney Terrell's The Good Lieutenant is a gripping, insightful, and necessary novel about a war that is proving to be the defining tragedy of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250132161
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

WHITNEY TERRELL is the author of The Huntsman, a New York Times notable book, and The King of Kings County. He is the recipient of a James A. Michener-Copernicus Society Award and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. He was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. His nonfiction has additionally appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, The New York Observer, The Kansas City Star, and other publications. He teaches creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and lives nearby with his family.

Editorial Reviews

"Surprising...We are left to wonder about our own lies, when they became acceptable to us, whom we trust and how we’ve become who we are." —The New York Times Book Review

"A bitter, sly, heartbreaking story of well-meant but ill-fated intentions, and of a battlefield incident that wreaks havoc on the lives that converge, or end, there." —The New Yorker

"Terrell's audacious new novel begins with a literal bang as a U.S. Army patrol in Iraq goes terribly wrong for Lt. Emma Fowler, who is present as her secret lover, Lt. Dixon Pulowski, is critically wounded in an explosion while attempting to recover the corpse of a kidnapped sergeant." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The Bush wars' best novel" —The Guardian

"[One of] 18 incredible books you need to read this summer." —BuzzFeed

"One of the most unique and deeply felt novels of the Iraq war." —Men's Journal

"An addicting epic about disaster and, more important, what leads to disaster." —The Washington Post

"Terrell has taken a stark departure from his Kansas City novels by writing about Fowler and her platoon, a recovery unit retrieving blown up vehicles and dead soldiers in Iraq during the dark days of high American casualties in 2006." —Lit Hub

"The details about Emma's trials feel true down to the tiniest details" —Los Angeles Review of Books

"War novels skew decidedly masculine - even as women have taken on greater prominence in the military in numbers and rank. Whitney Terrell breaks from that myopia in "The Good Lieutenant." —The Kansas City Star

"The novel's...reverse chronology...cleverly destabilizes expectations of closure, sidelining questions about the who, what, when of Fowler's failed raid to raise more difficult questions....A memorable tale of thwarted optimism, incomplete intimacy, and collateral damage." —Booklist

"A stunning and heartbreaking testament to Terrell’s genius and the nature of modern war.” —Gillian Flynn

"The Good Lieutenant has the grand complexity of war embedded in its bones. It makes ingenious, compelling art out of those complexities. For that reason alone, its considerable graces are saving ones." —Richard Ford

"Impossible to forget...Should be read by all." —Anthony Swofford

"Whitney Terrell has written a deeply moving work of fiction to set beside Phil Klay’s Redeployment and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, with a singularity of vision uniquely its own." —Joyce Carol Oates

"An arrestingly ingenious achievement." —Chang-rae Lee

"With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms—the war novel—and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly, a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration—everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant—and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backward, Memento­-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less." —Adam Johnson

"So exhilarating in its tautly rendered, faultless reality, so timeless in its play of human emotion in extremis, The Good Lieutenant dazzles and shames us as it breaks our hearts. In Lieutenant Emma Fowler, Whitney Terrell makes real the confused politics, personal heroism, and human cost of the Iraq War. The Good Lieutenant joins the ranks of great war novels that explain, too late, why 'victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.'" —Jayne Anne Phillips

"Whitney Terrell has been in his career both a great novelist and a great war reporter. In The Good Lieutenant he is both, and the effect is overpowering. One job of the reporter is to use facts to let us understand who these men and women are whom we ask to kill and die for us. One job of the novelist is to use imagination to explain the interior lives of others and the infinite nuances of life. It is extraordinary and rare that one writer can do both, but Whitney Terrell does, and masterfully." —Arthur Phillips

From the Publisher

…Terrell is experimenting with the slow revelation of character in the opposite direction of a normal narrative arc…Fowler is changed by bombs and casualties, her sense of morality transforms in order to exert control over chaos, and to avoid thinking of herself as a monster. In the end we are left to wonder about our own lies, when they became acceptable to us, whom we trust and how we've become who we are.

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Busch

★ 04/04/2016
Terrell’s audacious new novel begins with a literal bang as a U.S. Army patrol in Iraq goes terribly wrong for Lt. Emma Fowler, who is present as her secret lover, Lt. Dixon Pulowski, is critically wounded in an explosion while attempting to recover the corpse of a kidnapped sergeant. The narrative moves in reverse chronological order from there, to show the events before the botched operation, depicting the previous op that got the sergeant abducted at Muthanna intersection, an IED explosion at the same intersection that cost the lives of two soldiers earlier, a bad call made by the colonel who declared the intersection safe, and Fowler’s stateside training, where she begins her love affair with Pulowski. Although this backward conceit has been used before, as in the Christopher Nolan film Memento and the Harold Pinter play Betrayal, it works particularly well in this story, which employs the structure to critique the follies of the Iraq War and the adamantine nature of the military mind-set. Terrell (The King of Kings County) shows us how soldiers think and address one another with a stinging combination of military argot and pop culture references. The book’s last line echoes the title of one of the first novels about modern warfare, Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923), to which this novel is an entirely worthy successor. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins Associates. (June)

Publishers Weekly

05/15/2016
Lt. Emma Fowler is a young platoon leader struggling with doubts and insecurities as she learns to lead a group of soldiers battling their own personal issues in this unusually inward-looking novel of the Iraq War. It begins at a decisive moment, when a troubled soldier from the platoon, Carl Beale, is killed during a mission to fortify a dangerous intersection. From there, the story takes us back through the events and the complexities of the human relationships that led to that moment, as Fowler attempts to understand the circumstances surrounding Beale's death—did he deliberately disobey an order by charging into a warehouse?—while struggling with her own guilt at the loss of a soldier in her command. VERDICT This latest book from Terrell (after The King of Kings County) focuses not so much on military action and battle scenes (although those certainly are here) as on the interactions of a group of unheroic individuals thrown into an extreme situation. As such, it can seem somewhat undramatic for a war novel, yet it is exactly these confrontations among and within individuals that give the story its power and appeal. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/15.]—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Library Journal

This audiobook about a female lieutenant’s trial by fire in Iraq proceeds from the present to the past—not in typical flashback mode but as a completely linear backwards movement through time. This structure makes it difficult to follow the characters’ development. One might have expected a female narrator for this book, but, not to worry, narrator Jeffrey Kafer delivers Emma’s voice well. He also does a decent job of dramatizing her personality in this sometimes-confusing mélange. Occasionally, he seems to be trying to sound too portentous, and it works only in small doses. Otherwise, his pacing and timing are good, and the complex emotional landscapes he paints are often heartrending. M.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2017 - AudioFile

2016-03-16
A glimpse of the war in Iraq, as told by the acclaimed author of The King of Kings County (2005) and The Huntsman (2001). As this novel begins, Lt. Emma Fowler is leading her platoon on a recovery mission. Sgt. Carl Beale is already dead; her team is trying recover his corpse. Beneath the veneer of confidence necessary to command, Fowler is plagued by doubts and anxieties—about the interrogation methods used to locate Beale's body, about the probable connection between such abuses and the betrayal that led to Beale's death, about signal officer Dixon Pulowski and whether or not she can trust him to keep quiet about the possibility of torture, about the probability of keeping her lover—Pulowski again—safe during this mission….And then everything really goes to hell. Terrell is a journalist as well as a novelist. He was an embedded reporter between 2006 and 2010, and he covered the war in Iraq for the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. Clearly, he has an informed perspective on this particular conflict, and anyone who has read his previous fiction will be inclined to trust him as a narrator. This makes his latest novel all the more baffling. From the very beginning, it's difficult to understand what's happening where and when and why. And this isn't just fog-of-war-style confusion. Even outside the action, it's difficult for the reader to find his or her bearings. For example, even before the first chapter reaches its awful conclusion, it's already confusing: what's the relationship between Fowler's platoon and a patrol already on duty there? Is it important that Pulowski is installing cameras at this rural location? Are the cameras as important as the recovery of Beale's body? Are they more important? Terrell's choice to create a narrative that moves backward in time means that readers have to carry these questions with them as they read and hope for answers. As a metaphor for the latest Gulf War, this might make sense. But it makes for a very challenging novel. Informed witness; overly complicated storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews