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
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