What readers think of Absolution, plus links to write your own review.

I was amazed to realize I had never read Alice McDermott before. So, I am so glad I rectified this mistake. Absolution is a strong historical fiction that captures the lives of young American families living in Saigon in 1963, before the war, as I think of it, was truly underway.

Told mostly in the second person narrative, from the viewpoint of sixty years later, Tricia is speaking to Charlene’s daughter, Rainey, who was just a youngster at the time. Tricia and Charlene were both young married women living in Saigon. Charlene is definitely the Alpha female. She draws the shy Tricia into her orbit. She is determined to help the Vietnamese. But her help consists of providing candy, toys, clothing - “inconsequential good”, as Rainey labels it.

I loved what this book had to say about the American sense of superiority, altruism, the expected role of women, motherhood and the Catholic faith. It’s a deep book, the kind that works well as a book club selection. I was impressed by McDermott’s ability to take me back in time. The families might have been in Saigon, but they just transplanted their US lives - the cocktail parties, the dress code, the volunteerism, to a different locale. She totally got the attitude of a woman as a “helpmate”.

She also transports the reader to Saigon and shows the juxtaposition of their privileged lives, complete with servants against the poverty, the disease and the effects of the violence that the Vietnamese were experiencing. Even those seeking to do good took advantage of the situation. The interlude in the middle gives the reader a glimpse into Rainey’s adult life. It works to give us an update on the adults from the time. I did laugh to finally realize Rainey would be basically my age.

I listened to this and the two narrators both did lovely jobs.

McDermott is a master story teller about the real lives of real women in a challenging time and place. The female American protagonists follow their establishment husbands to war adjacent Saigon in the early 60s. The epistolary narrative structure works so well to revisit that setting.

The women were shackled by cultural roles, foreignness and personal burdens. Despite these constraints, they tried to do good. On the surface they were all tea parties and gift baskets but underneath they were black market operators and rule breakers. Love that "don't ask permission ask forgiveness" characterization.

The world around them reminded them constantly: you and your work are inconsequential. McDermott makes a different point. The "little" contributions counteract a little bit of evil. Their work would absolve a little American guilt.

McDermott shares the women completely. Husbands are peripheral but claustrophobic long-term marriages are astutely observed. Charlene and Tricia, the friends at center stage, are beautifully understood. Charlene, the dynamo, was relentless in her pursuit of charitable works until the end. But she was never smarmy, she was so cool. Like my namesake Tricia, I would have been sucked into her orbit. Happily, at the dramatic surprise conclusion, Tricia stands up to friend and husband. Well done!

In a word: brilliant!

This is a book about Vietnam in the very early days of the war, a story you've never heard before. This is a book about the women, the wives of the important men—diplomats, engineers, intelligence officers, attorneys, and military brass. These bright young men were sent to Saigon in the early '60s to do mostly secret work while their pretty little wives threw garden parties and cocktail parties with local servants doing all the work. This is a book about two of those women, who didn't exactly fit the mold.

Written 60 years later as a kind of memoir/letter by Tricia to her friend Charlene's daughter, Rainey, this is the story of a brief stint in Vietnam in 1963. Peter and Tricia are working class Irish Catholics from Yonkers. He is eight years older than she and is in Vietnam working as an attorney for Navy intelligence. They are desperately trying to have a baby. Charlene and her husband, Kent, have been there a while with their three children, 8-year-old twins Rainey and Ransom and baby Roger. Charlene is pretty, smart, bossy, a bit of a bully, and a vivacious hostess; she also has a passion for "doing good" that is wonderful but heartbreaking in who gets hurt in the process. Life is so different for these women, and not only because they are in Vietnam. They are considered nothing more than "helpmeets" for their husbands. Trish often writes, "You have to remember how it was in those days. For women. For wives." They are women on the periphery. Women no one takes seriously. Meanwhile, outside their wealthy, guarded compounds, Vietnamese children are starving, families are living in abject poverty, and people are dying in surprise attacks by the Viet Cong. What is the moral obligation of these protected, pampered wives as they seek absolution in a broken, tragic place that is gearing up for a horrifying war?

Bonus: Barbie dolls have a big part in this book—a part that is both surprising and appalling.

Beautifully written with so many details and lush descriptions that it transports the reader back to this time and place, this remarkable novel is an enlightening and provocative expose on unseen women with unseen lives. This is a story of Vietnam you've never heard before.