What Now, Lieutenant

Frank Porter

BESOTTED by the women who inflame, entice but usually elude or ignore them, What Now, Lieutenant tracks three men from the Second World War into the present century.

Dr. Elder is a well-intentioned classicist/polytheist, who, having been flung into the Battle of the Bulge, emerges physically intact and embarks on a quest for a congenial wife and a stress-free life.

Freddy (he’d much prefer “Fred”), Dr. Elder’s unprepossessing son, aches to excel and live up to his mistaken image of his father.

Daniel Shaver, Dr. Elder’s disadvantaged protege and Freddy’s implacable rival, is a bubbling cauldron of insatiable ambition, inexhaustible ego, and irrepressible id. He’ll do whatever’s expedient to triumph everywhere, whether it’s the boardroom, the battlefield, or the boudoir.

Meanwhile, the women are having none of it. They propel the narrative and treat the men with disdain or, at best, provisional tolerance.

FRANK PORTER lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ann, and their small dog. He used to practice law. Now he does other things. He touched on the law in his 2018 ribald novel, Semper Fee.