I read Absolution by Alice McDermott for book club. I didn’t love it, but I found it an intriguing read that rang true in a lot of ways. I was the only one in the group who enjoyed it, and while my perspective was able to diminish some of the hatred into apathy or general dislike, on the whole it was not a rousing success.
What’s it about?(Description from Goodreads)
A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War.
In Saigon in 1963, two young American wives form a wary alliance. Tricia is a starry-eyed newlywed, married to a rising oil engineer “on loan” to US Navy Intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a talented hostess and determined altruist, on a mission to relieve the “wretchedness” she sees all around her.
When Tricia miscarries, Charlene sweeps her into a cabal of well-dressed do-gooder American wives. Armed with baskets filled with candy and toys, they descend on hospitals, orphanages, and a leper colony on the coast, determined to relieve suffering, no matter the cost.
Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter reaches out to Tricia, now widowed and living in Washington. As the two relive their shared experience in Saigon, they are forced to come to terms with the ways their own lives have been shaped and stunted by Charlene’s pursuit of “inconsequential good.”
With a narrative impact that recalls Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , Alice McDermott confronts the unresolved mysteries and ironies of America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
What’d I think?
I wasn’t alive at the time of the Vietnam War and I’ve never been a military spouse, but I have been a military dependent. My dad was in the military for thirty years, so I spent my whole childhood in that environment. McDermott’s depiction of the military wife hit close to home for me. The way that the women have to doll themselves up to be ornaments to their husbands. The way that they have to smile and support it all unquestionably even as their own wants and needs are not considered by the larger military unit or even by their own husbands. The military expects spouses (usually wives) and children to be the appearance of the perfect family, and Charlene in particular made perfect sense to me. The way that she tries so hard to make a difference within the tiny parameters she is allowed. The way that in the little things she won’t take no for an answer, but the way she can’t make any big, visible swings. The way that she has to pass half her ideas off as Tricia’s to give them different optics. That felt so true to me. Military wives are supposed to look beautiful and altruistic but only do it in a very limited way. Charlene’s agony to break through those narrow borders was so clear.
And yet… she put herself in the position of being a white savior. While in some cases she did good, in others she overstepped completely and ended up doing real harm. She’s a fascinating character because it is so clear that she wants to do good things and that she’s pinned in by her husband’s career but many of the things she ends up doing are wrong, the plan to steal Vietnamese children and sell them to a “better life” with white parents being the most glaringly horrific/racist.
The way McDermott does it is rather brilliant. Charlene—and through her Tricia—think they’re helping, but really they’re making a mess of things. This intersects in a larger way with the Catholics and Americans inserting themselves into Vietnam and patting themselves on the back for it. I love when a book can make commentary on multiple things at once, both the Vietnam War overall and the role of a military wife.
I saw a lot of myself, feeling helpless within the militaristic machine, in the dependents in this book. It’s a very paralyzing feeling, isolating, that awareness that you have to be perfect in this one specific way, that you should be seen physically present and smiling but that no one actually cares about you as an individual. It’s very difficult and it was fascinating and affirming to see it depicted in a novel. Books about the military are usually about, well, the military (or the civilians, depending on the perspective of the story, saved or harmed by their interference). I really enjoyed that.
I am, however, inclined to agree with the rest of the book club that beyond that depiction of the invisible women, the novel doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s no moment of catharsis. There’s no climax. There’s just… a time jump and a petering out of the story. Maybe that’s how the real world is, but I wanted something more narratively.
Still, I liked the way that the novel shows the many ways the many people wash their hands of their wrongdoing. Charlene never admits that many of her most well-intentioned actions were rooted in racism and white saviorism. Tricia’s husband never admits that he is wrong even in the smallest thing. The Americans and the Catholics never admit the missteps they made in Vietnam. It’s an interesting commentary on the war, on a lot of things.
The only real exception to the constant dodging of responsibility is in the parenting. I’m not usually a fan of books about parenthood, but Absolution has some beautiful moments. Charlene’s motives may be suspect a lot of the time, but she is fiercely loyal to her children, even if her daughter doesn’t believe it. To her immense sadness, Tricia and her husband aren’t able to have children, but her greatest moment of triumph is when she’s able to put the good of a child ahead of her own desire.
One of my favorite parts of the book was in the beautiful relationship between Dominic—one of the young soldiers Tricia and Charlene meet in Vietnam—and his adopted son. The reader sees Dominic as a young soldier and then, later, as an old man caring deeply for his adult son, who is mentally disabled. Our POV character, Charlene’s daughter, is dismissive, feeling sympathy for Dominic for having been saddled with a disabled child. She is later surprised to learn the depths of love and pride Dominic has for his son, as well as the revelation that Dominic adopted his son. The people around Dominic and his son whisper at them and pity them, but Dominic has thrown himself fully into parenting. He adores his son and is immensely proud of him. He would literally die for his son, and the whispers around them don’t affect either father or son. There’s a purity about the parenting in Absolution that is decidedly absent elsewhere, and while that may not absolve the characters of the harm that they did in other planes of their life, it is something.It’s the only time when anyone is all in on anything, for the ups and the downs.
What’s the verdict?
Absolution is an interesting read. I was gratified to read a story that centered on military spouses and families and acknowledged the difficulties in that role, and I was fascinated in the way that McDermott constructed a picture of the Vietnam War and the American military that allowed for sympathy for the Americans while focusing on the unintended harm done by those who were all to ready to wash their hands of it when they decided it was over. It’s not a novel I would recommend highly—I was literally the only one in my book club to like it—but it certainly made me think. If you’re interested in military history, particularly from underrepresented POVs, you will probably like it. It doesn’t dig deeply into the particulars of the Vietnamese experience, but it is thematically interesting in the way it handles responsibility and the lack thereof.
