Better Books #4: The Good Lieutenant

The Good Lieutenant, by Whitney Terrell, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), brought me as close to the terror and tedium of a soldier’s life in Iraq as I imagine a book is capable of, despite a number of structural weaknesses. The style worked well in keeping me just a little off balance throughout, which created an atmosphere of relentless suspense. Terrell makes good use of a disjointed and backward-looking narrative that fosters an atmosphere of ambiguity, confusion, doubt, and dread among dark, rather desperate attempts at humor; all of which seems about right for ordinary people trying to make the best of nightmarish circumstances.

That said, the love affair between the two central characters never quite catches fire. Their interactions and couplings seem perfunctory, and repetitive, almost as though they are just following orders instead of their hearts. When they are trying to be funny the humor is too shallow, and when they have deeper discussions, the dialog attempts cerebral, philosophical acrobatics that seem wildly out of character, and fall flat. I had trouble believing soldiers, or much of anybody, speaks the way too many of the characters do: as though they are expected to sound witty, sardonic, and intellectual at all times.

Full disclosure: I once had the dubious pleasure of serving in the military, which perhaps accounts for my difficulty at times not to hold the book at arm’s length. The more the author heaped on details of soldierly trappings and daily discomforts, the less real the story seemed, as though written by someone trying to impersonate the characters, not let them live their own lives. There are some clunkers that could, and should have been eliminated:

• Too many descriptions of soldiers putting on and taking off their body armor, or descriptions of same deposited about their offices and living quarters, as though the reader needs constant reminders that these are soldiers at war.

• Basic factual errors, such as a description of an officer’s insignia that is wrong both in color and shape.

• Too many acronyms, not all of which, I think, are ever defined: TOC, DFAC, AO. Yes, government, and especially the military, loves acronyms. Overuse of them does not lend an effect of authenticity. It just draws too much attention to the effort.

Counter-intuitively, or perhaps somewhat as a result of my ignorance about the life and culture of Iraqis, the story came most alive for me in the segments describing Iraqi civilians as they attempt to navigate the dangerous vagaries of life in a country only nominally controlled by an occupying force. More likely, I suspect Terrell was freed, or compelled, to be his most creative by the constraints of breathing life into such foreign characters. He did a superb job here, as when he sketched so powerfully the palpable disdain from an Iraqi woman directed at the American soldiers despite the circumstances of her interrogation. With a few strokes he put a face on the horror of an absurd war as we are given a glimpse of the immensity of her personal loss.

One final thing. Terrell knows how to end a story. He captures perfectly the tone and theme, the resolve of men and women enduring, and persevering, simply because they are where they are.