Absolution by Alice McDermott: lacerating intelligence

“It seemed to me in those days that Charlene had her fingers in everyone’s lives. I’ve heard the phrase of late, ‘white saviour.’ Charlene, despite her freckles, would have fit the bill.”

Moral reckonings feature prominently in the fiction of Alice McDermott, an American author whose work over a long career is perhaps less well known on this side of the Atlantic than contemporaries such as Ann Patchett or Elizabeth Strout.

McDermott’s latest novel Absolution may change that, offering a fresh perspective on a regrettable period of American history – the Vietnam War – through a wonderfully immersive story that deserves a wide readership.

The book’s chief narrator, Tricia, looks back on her time as a shy newly-wed in awe of her husband, a lawyer who takes a government posting in Saigon some months before the fall and assassination of the American-backed Ngo Dinh Diem.

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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At a garden party for expats, Tricia is befriended by one of the alpha-wives, Charlene, whose white saviour description above succinctly summarises a woman determined to help the poor and wounded locals through whatever means she can.

The irony of American women seeking to improve the horrific conditions of Vietnam’s orphaned, injured children while the work of their bureaucrat husbands contributes to ever more death and destruction gives some indication of the complexity of the novel.

The characterisation of Charlene is similarly intricate: her brash, brilliant, bullying manner that succeeds in getting things done. Her ideas and plans, while terrifically flawed, appear to have a weird logic amid the oppressive heat, poverty and violence of Saigon.

To say more would spoil the plot, but the moral quandaries at the heart of the book are skilfully excavated by an author attuned to the awful contradictions and compromises of the time.

McDermott lives in Washington DC. Her novels include Someone, The Ninth Hour, After This, Child of My Heart, Charming Billy, At Weddings and Wakes, That Night and A Bigamist’s Daughter. She won the National Book Award for Charming Billy, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

In Absolution, there are parallels with Ann Patchett’s recent novel Tom Lake, chiefly in the reflective tone, and in the quiet reveals that occur at classical points in the story.

The setting and retrospective narrative recalls David Park’s Spies in Canaan. Both books are concerned with the impact of war on the individual, those smaller personal decisions made quickly at a time of huge public turmoil, which turn into decades-long sources of grief or regret.

The structure of Absolution – a letter from an older Tricia to Charlene’s adult daughter Rainey – lends itself to confession, a raking over history for the purposes of atonement, or at the very least, a clearer understanding of the past.

A shift to Rainey’s viewpoint three quarters of the way through the novel brings new characters and new problems.

In lesser hands this could prove a distraction, but McDermott’s careful rendering adds layers of meaning to the Saigon narrative. If the latter is occasionally in danger of seeming arc-less, an episode suspended in time, the smart ending acts as an antidote, asking the reader to reconsider their own preconceptions and biases.

McDermott is a subtle writer – a side character of a shadowy American doctor is perhaps a little too shadowy to have impact – who knows when to turn up the dial, saving her most sensual and evocative depictions for the world of the novel.

A market in downtown Saigon: “I can still feel the wave of horror that nearly knocked me off my feet when I glimpsed a row of slaughtered monkeys hanging from a pole across the length of one of the stalls: milky gray, headless little corpses strung upside down, legs bound as if kneeling – looking for all the world like the pale bodies of sacrificed children.”

Elsewhere there’s a moment of respite in a hospital of sick and disfigured children distracted by toys: “The kids rolled with laughter. God, it made your heart ache, that lovely, childish laughter. At such a time, in such a place.”

The feminist viewpoint so many years later is distancing and enlightening, as Tricia looks back on her adulation for her husband and his career, “for his golden future, for my role in it as his helpmeet” (how very Handmaid’s Tale that word sounds now).

Over the course of Absolution, McDermott turns this same lacerating intelligence on issues of class, money, race, marriage, infertility and above all, the questionable politics that led to the Vietnam War. This is history as seen from the perspective of the wives, which is to say, the story of what really happened.