Absolution
by Alice McDermott
Buy on AmazonA 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.…
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"In Absolution, Alice McDermott transports her signature characters – Irish American, Catholic, working-class New Yorkers – to Vietnam, circa 1963. Tricia Kelly is a shy newlywed who aspires “to be a helpmeet for my husband” – an engineer allegedly working for “navy intelligence.” Charlene is a strawberry-blond dynamo of a corporate wife who conscripts Tricia into her charity projects in hospitals and orphanages. McDermott brilliantly evokes the early buildup of American involvement in Vietnam as witnessed by some “minor characters” – expat wives mostly oblivious to the deeper machinations of their husbands and country."
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