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Absolution, by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott’s most recent novel Absolution is a masterpiece. The setting and plot are fresh while at the same time abundantly nostalgic for readers who came of age in the 60s and 70s. They focus attention and elicit involvement through excellent writing, intrigue and character development that focuses closely on the nuances of body language and facial expression. The structure reinforces the overall complexity of the plot by suddenly in Part II switching to a different narrator fifty years or more into the future, and then in Part III back again to 1963, the initial year of the narrative, which completes the story but leaves the reader with numerous questions to ponder and discuss.

The setting is Saigon, Vietnam in a single year of America’s on-the-ground presence there. The war itself is mostly in the background, except for a couple of vivid scenes – one in the children’s ward of a hospital and the other a trip to and from a leprosarium by the principal characters, two young wives of American officers temporarily serving the military from the corporate world.

In Part I and Part II the year is 1963 and Tricia is the narrator. In Part II the time frame is fifty to sixty years later, and Rainy the daughter of Charlene, the other main character, is the narrator.

As the plot unfolds, we learn that Tricia is narrating the story as a letter in response to a request by Rainy to provide background on Dom her new neighbor in a rural location in Maryland who was a medic in Saigon and friends with both Tricia and Charlene when Rainy was a child there with her family.

The plot centers on the relationship between Tricia and Charlene and especially on Charlene’s overpowering and complex personality. She pushes and pulls at naïve, self-conscious newlywed Tricia, and much like the spider with the fly, enmeshes her in the web of her cabal – as Charlene’s husband describes his wife’s circle of fellow do-gooder friends. In fact, she designates Tricia as the originator of two major projects that occur to her seemingly off the top of her head but drive much of the narrative: One to produce Vietnamese outfits for Barbie dolls and sell them to make money for Charlene’s hospital charity baskets and the other, far more ambitious one, to make silk garments for patients in the leprosarium. Tricia realizes that Charlene needs a foil, what Tricia identifies as a “saint” to dilute her “smarter that everyone else” persona.

As the novel progresses, we learn that Charlene has another do-gooder project. She procures Vietnamese babies to sell to the highest bidder. Knowing how desperately Tricia yearns for a child, she gifts her a baby.

The simple urge to do good versus the lofty goal to “repair the world” runs throughout the novel. The later seems largely the aim of men fighting a righteous war against communism while the former occupies women and is frequently dubbed inconsequential, even by the women themselves. Though Charlene and Tricia return to America, a place of safety to love and live with their families, more globally the war doesn’t bring about a better world for all. As we see in Part II, Rainey and her eventual husband both fall victim to the burgeoning demon of drug addiction in their youth. Dom and his family live in a nearly ramshackle house, and Dom dies after falling into a pit of human waste. The epigraph from Graham Green’s The Quiet American captures a common sentiment about the war’s aftermath – “…but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry.” – someone who could grant absolution.

Perhaps Charlene’s small acts of goodness – soothing wounded children in a hospital ward by providing treats and stuffed animals or delighting the lepers with the promise of fine silk clothing – accomplished more and required no absolution, though this avenue of activity was the only one open to women in Charlene and Tricia’s circumstances, at least the only legitimate one. Sexism was alive and well in the early 1960s. It’s evident in the everyday condescending interactions between husband and wife under which Charlene chaffs, but to which Tricia is largely oblivious, befogged by the joys of early married life.

Demonstrating her Catholic faith in an act deserving absolution, Tricia returns Charlene’s gift child after initially being tempted to keep the baby. She says,”…I can think only of hot and cold – hot with anger, at Charlene, at Peter, at everyone in my life who had considered my opinions inconsequential, who had lied to me, or ignored me or manipulated me for what they considered my own benefit. Hot to think of those who’d set out to do good on my behalf.” And when her husband comes home, she stands up to him for the first time.

Let the women’s movement begin.

— Sue Martin

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard

Candice Millard impressed our group before as an historian and as a storyteller – see our earlier review of Destiny of the Republic. This book repeats those skills and adds naturalist to our accolades.

Millard first introduces us to Theodore Roosevelt after his defeat for the presidency in 1912. After two terms as president, Roosevelt had selected William Howard Taft as his successor, but during Taft’s term they had a falling out and TR tried to unseat Taft in the 1912 election. In the end, they both lost to Woodrow Wilson. As he had done after the death of his first wife and after other disappointments, Roosevelt began looking for an adventure to make up for the loss. He seized on the idea of an Amazonian exploration. Both the North and South Poles had recently been explored, and the major rivers of Africa had been mapped; the Amazon was still largely unexplored. He outlined a speaking tour of South America with a river expedition to follow, descending a previously explored river that joined the Amazon. While Roosevelt was planning the speaking tour, various hangers-on planned and equipped the expedition for that route, though with little information on which to base their provisioning.

Filling in the map of interior Brazil was an ongoing challenge to its government, and the task was primarily entrusted to the Telegraph Commission, headed by Colonel Cândido Rondon, an army officer whose career mission was explore the Amazon Basin and to peacefully meet the indigenous inhabitants of the region. As luck would have it, Rondon was assigned to accompany and guide Roosevelt’s expedition. To further his own interests, Rondon preferred a route that would explore new country, and Roosevelt welcomed the adventure of new discovery. The River of Doubt met both men’s purposes. It was a river that was presumed to run hundreds of miles across the Amazon rain forest, but as of 1913, it remained unexplored and unmapped. Its source and outlet were known, but its course was a matter of doubt.

The expedition shifted to the River of Doubt, and it entered the unknown in February 1914.

What they passed through was Amazonian rain forest, a terrain for which they were remarkably unprepared. Here the naturalist part of Millard’s skill comes alive. She explains how the rain forest looks and feels, how it evolved, and importantly why the expedition was not able to forage food there. The rain forest had evolved highly specialized plants and animals that disperse themselves over wide regions and in unfamiliar ways. Animals and fruit are often at tree-top level and camouflaged so that the American and even the Brazilians could not spot anything, hunt anything, or harvest anything. Their crates of provisions, with rations of white wine and mustard, provided little nutrition but were a weighty hindrance at every one of the portages around the frequent rapids and waterfalls of the river. The expedition began on short rations, and since foraging was unsuccessful, time became the measure of their danger.

The expedition met a succession of native tribes, especially the Cinta Larga, who tracked them while remaining almost invisible. Remarkably, the tribes let the expedition pass without attack, not perceiving them as an actual threat. Given Rondon’s steadfast insistence on peaceful dealings, that judgment proved right, at least as to this expedition. The only deaths of the expedition were due to river accidents and a murder. (But in the long run, the fate of South American tribes was not much better than their North American counterparts).

Roosevelt’s ambition for adventure was more than satisfied. The expedition was out of touch with the rest of the world for about eight weeks. It was poorly equipped for what it confronted. The boats they took to Brazil were completely unsuitable, and the expedition ended up using hollow-log canoes with very shallow draft that were difficult to bring through rapids and were extremely heavy to portage. It lost half of those canoes and had to hollow out new ones at the cost of time and labor. The labor, of course, was initially performed by Brazilian camaradas, but soon the American and Brazilian officers were laboring alongside them. Rations were short to begin with, quickly diminished through accidents, and to the extreme disappointment of the Americans could not be supplemented by hunting. The rain forest proved as inhospitable as any adventurer could want. It was hot, buggy, and – surprise – rainy. Portaging the frequent rapids and falls ate up time and energy and invited accidents. The river contained piranhas and other deadly fish, along with parasites and disease. On land, the expedition was open to attack by unseen Indians and snakes. Insects brought constant misery and disease. Most of the expedition suffered from malaria, especially Roosevelt’s son Kermit, who had joined the expedition to protect his father. TR had a seriously infected leg injury that brought him near death. At one point he talked with Kermit about leaving him behind. Millard uses diaries and letters to give first-hand accounts of the desperation the expedition felt. It finally approached the Amazon and met rubber harvesters and the army unit that awaited them at the edge of civilization.

The book gave us a wealth of subjects for discussion. Most of us have crossed an Amazonian expedition off our bucket lists. The expedition was rife with the sense of cultural superiority common to explorers of that period, such as the reluctance to seek out local advice on such basics as food and boats. Millard gives great insights into the always fascinating characters of the Roosevelt family. While we are not planning Amazonian travel, we would be happy to read more of Millard’s work.

— Bill Smith

Horse, by Geraldine Brooks

Horse is a big, beautiful novel: The physical book, with its exuberant cover and elegant interior design; the story, told by five narrators, that sprawls over a hundred and seventy-five years. It’s a story about racehorses, slavery, the Civil War, race, racism, the connection between animals and people, art, history, museums, bone cleaning, skeletal articulation . . . The list is long.

Brooks explains in the backmatter that she first heard about the amazing racehorse and stud sire, Lexington, in 2010. She was seated at a luncheon by the person who had just handled the delivery of Lexington’s articulated skeleton to the Museum of the Horse in Kentucky. And she explains how her resulting research into horse racing in the mid-nineteenth century made her feel she couldn’t write about racehorses without writing about race. She also lists the characters in the novel who were real people and tells us a bit about them—for example, Black Jarrett’s owner, Dr. Warfield, who delivered Mary Todd Lincoln. Much of my enjoyment of the book comes from the clever and creative ways Brooks uses historical touchstones to unify and propel the two main stories.

The first story, that of Jarrett and Lexington, is told by Jarrett and Thomas J. Scott, the painter of racehorse portraits. Jarrett and the foal Darley (who becomes Lexington) are a matched pair until Lexington’s death. When they are separated by the whimsy of their owner, both suffer and are damaged. When they’re reunited, they heal. As a slave, Jarrett endures what he can’t change with canniness and dignity. But when the horses are threatened by Quantrill’s raiders, he reacts boldly and saves them and himself and a white man who once conspired against Jarrett and his father. Over the years, Thomas J. Scott, paints Lexington and Jarret for their owners, and he tries to befriend Jarrett. His intentions are good, but he always has a naïve understanding of what it really means to be owned.

Yet it’s his intuitive, beautiful portraits of Lexington, and the way the paintings pass from hand to hand, that unify the story—with one of them providing the much-needed bit of redemption in the second story, that of Theo and Jess. They are interesting young people in present day Georgetown. Theo is a Ph.D. candidate who believes art can change the world. Jess is an expert articulator of skeletons, and ultimately is invited to articulate Lexington’s bones, using Scott’s portraits for reference.

Their love story is touching, but complicated. They both have Australian roots. Theo is black, Jess is white. And they navigate racial shoals as most of us do–with good intentions, but a measure of ignorance and blundering awkwardness. Theo has encountered his share of racism playing polo in England, but he does not fully understand the precarity of American racism.

And in between these two love stories, is Martha Jackson’s narrative from the mid-fifties, a time of overwhelming white privilege in America. She is a wealthy art dealer who buys an old family painting of a horse from her black maid Annie as a well-meaning act of patronage. It ends up in the Smithsonian after Jackson’s death, and is a reference for Jess’s articulation of Lexington’s bones.

Brooks doesn’t tell this hundred and seventy-five-year story in a chronological line, but weaves back and forth between the time periods, creating a tapestry-like structure—one of the aspects of the novel I admired the most.

Theo’s is the first voice we hear, and Jess’s is the last. And I think, through them, Brooks is asking the question of the book: Is there hope for our deeply racist country?

Jarrett and Lexington’s story out of slavery shows us hope fulfilled: Jarrett is a free and prosperous man who can afford a portrait of Lexington by the end of the story; Lexington is retired to the cushy life of an occasional stud sire. But now we’re a hundred and seventy-five years beyond that story, where the evil of slavery has been replaced by the evil of racism.

When Brooks turned down that road of American racism, I so didn’t want to go. I was pulled out of the story the moment Jess began to fret that she had offended Theo in the conversation over the bike. But I loved Jess and Theo’s characters. They’re smart, but vulnerable. They’re devoted to Theo’s Australian dog, Clancy. They have good friends. Theo is a kind and principled person who deeply believes in the transformative power of art, and Jess—as she closes the story—hopes he’s right. For a moment on the airplane, she can believe he’s right. And Brooks does show us at least one racist person, Jarrett’s elderly white neighbor across the street, being redeemed by art.

Many of us struggled with Theo and Jess’s story, feeling it was sometimes clunky. Not nuanced. Stereotypical. I remind myself of what I’ve heard our wise Deacon Jeanie say more than once. “There’s a reason stereotypes exist, you know.” And, in the final analysis, who doesn’t love a good horse story with a gorgeous cover?

— Sharelle Moranville