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A Novel
by Alice McDermott
Book Reviewed by:A riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to "do good" for the people of Vietnam.
Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene's altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands' convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America's tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.
Excerpt
Absolution
THERE WERE SO MANY COCKTAIL PARTIES in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties nonetheless.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
Most days, I would bathe in the morning and then stay in my housecoat until lunch, reading, writing letters home—those fragile, pale blue airmail letters with their complex folds; evidence, I think now, of how exotic distance itself once seemed.
I'd do my nails, compose the charming bread-and-butter notes we were always exchanging—wedding stationery with my still-new initials, real ink, and cunning turns of phrase, bits of French, exclamation marks galore. The fan moving overhead and the heat encroaching even through the slatted blinds of the shaded room, the spice of sandalwood from the joss stick on the dresser.
Out for a luncheon or a lecture or a visit to the crowded market, and then another bath when I woke from my ...
McDermott seems interested in writing about degrees of marginality, of guilt, and of goodness. The women endure their husbands' sexist jokes and the patronizing attitudes of male doctors they often work alongside in their mission to provide relief to the ill; yet they themselves tend to otherize the Vietnamese people, despite their best intentions. And of course there's the bigger picture: the reason the Americans are "cocooned" in the country in the first place is an unstable mixture of quixotic democratic fervor and pure greed. Absolution takes a thought-provoking fresh perspective on a much-fictionalized chapter of history, which is best represented by the fact that it elides John F. Kennedy's assassination and focuses instead on when the First Lady gave birth to a stillborn child and was the last person to find out about it after the media quickly broke the story. "You have to understand what it was like in those days," Tricia writes, "for us, the wives."..continued
Full Review
(704 words)
(Reviewed by Jacob Lenz-Avila).
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation. Absolution is one of the finest contemporary novels I've read. It is a moral masterpiece. Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
With Absolution, Alice McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart. McDermott is a storyteller who aims for the stars. Absolution takes us there, by way of wartime Saigon, and with a powerful reminder that good intentions can have consequences that jerk us awake over a lifetime. What a splendid, compelling book this is.
Alice McDermott's novel about the humanitarian efforts of American corporate wives living in Vietnam in the early '60s, Absolution, takes a detour to New York City in the previous decade, where Tricia, the protagonist, and her radicalized friend Stella participate in sit-ins against the compulsory Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
In 1954, the U.S. Federal Civil Defense Agency inaugurated an annual civil defense preparedness drill, dubbed Operation Alert, in which everyone in big cities ("target areas"), like New York, was instructed to duck and cover for fifteen minutes, ostensibly to practice bracing themselves for an attack from the Soviet Union. During that same interval, federal alert systems throughout the country were tested, ...
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