Absolution (2023)
By Alice McDermott
Thorndike/Gale, 336 pages
★★★★ ½
Kristin Hannah’s The Women has won kudos this year. I liked it, but if you’ve not read Absolution by Alice McDermott, hers is a superior look at women during the Vietnam War. McDermott has been hailed for interjecting Irish American Catholic values into her novels, but that’s not quite right; she’s a moralist, but doesn’t always hew approved church lines. She is, however, brilliant at observing small details that add up to something big.
Absolution is a front-to-back novel that takes us from 2023 to 1963 revealed in letters and memories between (Pa)Tricia” Kelly and Rainey, the adult daughter of Charlene Kent who Tricia knew in Vietnam. Tricia lands in Saigon in 1963 with her husband Peter, a lawyer and Naval officer who’s probably an intelligence agent. He is gung-ho in support for John F. Kennedy, the U.S. military mission, and South Vietnam’s Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem.
From the standpoint of women,1963 Saigon is a potentially dangerous shopping excusion nearby the pristine grounds of the club where officers and their wives live in cloistered comfort. Among the details McDermott gets right are the expectations for women in a period in which feminism, Vatican II, and the counterculture haven’t yet happened. Tricia and her peers see themselves as “helpmeets” to their husbands. They obsess over makeup, hair, girdles, nylons, Betty Crocker cookbooks, and getting pregnant. Charlene is an exception; she delights in violating norms. Though she’s rich and entitled, she’s irreverent, smokes, pops pills, and calls her maid Lilly, though her name is actually Ly.
Charlene is also forceful to the edge of bullying. Her latest idea is to draft Tricia in in a now-cringeworthy scheme of convincing officer wives to mass produce “Saigon Barbies,” dolls wearing a Vietnamese áo dài. They plan to enlist Vietnamese women to sew the clothing and then sell the Barbies to women in the States. Charlene reckons they will be in demand, and she’s right–as long as you overlook the cultural appropriation and labor exploitation involved. The money is used to buy toys, sweets, and trinkets for hospitalized children. Poor Tricia is so naïve that she’s never heard about napalm and wonders why so many youngsters have horrible burns.*
Tricia is desperate to have a child, but miscarries. In a bold stroke that violates Catholic doctrine, Charlene baptizes Tricia’s expelled fetus. Is she helping Tricia cast off soon-to-be archaic values, or does she just not see beyond her own views? When she takes Tricia to a leper colony outside the city to see Ly’s cousin, is it an act of charity or an inexcusably reckless action? You can imagine how Peter feels; he has already admonished Tricia not to give money to beggars or leave safe zones.
Charlene precipitates an essential crisis for Tricia as her time in Vietnam grows short; she presents Tricia with a Vietnamese baby to take home with her! She assures Tricia that “Suzie” comes from a family with too many children, won’t be missed, and can be raised with advantages she’d never have otherwise. Talk about a moral dilemma!
At this point we have a novel that draws upon works such as The Ugly American and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Plus, it’s an indictment of American exceptionalism ideals, which purport that the United States is distinct and special in world history. Such a view easily mutates into a belief in moral superiority and a sense that all actions can be justified because American intentions are always good. Vietnam, of course, subsequently called this into question.
The last third of Absolution looks at life after Vietnam and Tricia’s eventual connection with Rainey and Dominic, a conscious objector whom she first met at the leper colony. Tricia has long since lost her innocence and naiveté, including her realization that the Vietnam War was immoral. That’s just the tip of ways in which her life has changed. Personally, as well as McDermott writes, I think her themes of absolution are implied in her Vietnam sections; in essence, she could have written a novella. However, I can’t fault her for wanting to close the circle on her characters. I admired, though, her courage to leave it to the reader to define what absolution means, to whom, and whether it was achieved.
Rob Weir
*Small detail error: Napalm was not used until 1965.
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