Absolution
Ratings7
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings7
Average rating4.1
A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Wow. This was powerful, devastating, smart, and troubling. Perfect for book club. It captures a place and time; the gender dynamics; problems of benevolence; colonialism and race; marriage; generational change; mothers and daughters; and the yearning to be good, to matter, to help, to love.
TW: portrayal of several miscarriages and the callous 1960s response to them by the medical (and general) community
Understated but powerful novel about the wives who accompanied their husbands to Vietnam in the early 1960s, before US troops were directly involved in the war. The book is narrated primarily by Tricia, the shy newlywed whose greatest dream is to be a good “helpmeet” to her Naval husband. But the character who leaves the strongest impression is Charlene, an experienced corporate spouse with the face of an angel and the personality of a shark. Charlene ropes Tricia into her scheme to make money by selling Barbie dolls dressed in traditional Vietnamese garb and then using the proceeds to buy food and toys for hospitalized Vietnamese children. Do her actions reek of white privilege, cultural appropriation, and colonial arrogance? Is she making a real difference in the children's lives considering the larger reality that they are the victims of a deadly proxy war that will eventually destroy their country?
McDermott doesn't supply easy answers to those questions. Although the novel shows a variety of relationships between parents and their children, she doesn't pass judgement on their relative merits either. After a devastating reveal about Tricia's final days in Vietnam, the book ends abruptly in the present, leaving a multitude of unanswered questions. McDermott has crafted a haunting portrayal of a pivotal moment in American history and filled it with fascinating, flawed characters. Not a happy read, but one with sufficient grace to keep the overall tone from being a total downer.
