Absolution by Alice McDermott

I have been reading novels by Alice McDermott all of my adult life, a new one every few years or more, with the most recent, Absolution, published this fall. Reading this novel, by a writer of my own age, who writes about a time I can remember, 1963. When most of this story takes place, I was much the same age of Rainey, daughter of Charlene. Charlene is the wife of Kent. They are members of the American ex-pat community in Saigon, businessmen who have an interest in Vietnam and governmental officials, including military intelligence officers. One of these officers is Peter Kelley, newly arrived, along with his young wife, Patricia.

There are the men, with their very serious jobs, and there are the wives. The wives are expected to support their husbands, and to be perfectly turned out at the obligatory and numerous cocktail parties and dinners that all attend. It is part of the job. Anne McDermott’s description of Patricia preparing for one of these evenings was my own mother’s life as a military wife in foreign lands, her dresses, stockings and gloves. Her Birks box full of “those fragile, pale blue airmail letters with their complex folds”.

Charlene is an experienced wife, and mother. She is a woman who knows what she wants to do, and does it. She befriends Patricia and involves her in schemes to raise money to help the poor of Saigon, children in hospital and others in need. You will be forgiven, when the Barbie doll project is launched, if you think this book is not for you. But, stay with it. There is much more to come that more than makes up for what seems facile, at best.

The story begins with Patricia, now a much older woman telling her story. We realize at some point that she is telling this to Charlene’s daughter, Rainey. Though Rainey remembers much of the life her family lived in Saigon, she was too young to understand so much of what her mother was doing at the time. Patricia can tell her now.

The second part of the novel is Rainey’s story, revealing what happened to her family, and to some of the others they all knew in Vietnam. And the third part, Patricia’s response. Nicely wrapping things up for the reader.

I think of the war in Vietnam from the perspective of my generation, of the young American men who lost their lives in jungle warfare, the body count on the television news. The draft dodgers, the protests. A war the Vietnamese call “the American War”. Absolution brings us a different story, that of the wives, women who witnessed.

I wondered at the title – as the biblical definition of absolution is “an ecclesiastical declaration of forgiveness of sins”. There is no doubt much to be forgiven – many sins – but I also felt compassion for these women, especially those who tried to do good. Alice McDermott, as always, perfectly captures a time and place and takes us there.