Absolution is about a lively & confident woman, Charlene, who lived overseas with her family in 1964 Saigon. It is told from the point of view of a couple individuals who lived in Charlene's orbit during that time. We learn a lot about the narrators, but Charlene is the thread holding the story together and tethering the main characters as well. The story is well paced and absorbing in the detail used to describe Vietnam before the war escalated. Charlene used her charisma and charm to "do good in the world" throughout her life, especially during her time in Saigon. The novel challenges readers to think about how we help others, if it is an obligation or a requirement, and what if our definition of a "good" deed is not in alignment with those we help?

An amazing book-one of the best I’ve read in quite a while. It seems that Vietnam is now a place that can be discussed the story gives a good description of a vanished time-almost of innocence and lost mores. The writing is extraordinary, the pacing, the characters. It was as though I was sitting and listening to a master story teller. The descriptions made you feel you were there and experiencing everything as the expats did.

It's early days in the Vietnam conflict and nonmilitary personnel were there as liaisons to the military such as engineers. Where these men go, so go their families. This is where we meet newlywed Tricia, a woman who comes across privately judgmental of other privileged women but longing to be one herself. Lucky for Tricia, she is taken in almost immediately by the grand dame of the corporate wives, Charlene.
Charlene is smart, too smart for the other wives. To tone down her drive, she comes up with ideas and credits the new arrival, Tricia. The two women meet frequently, most often during some sort of cocktail party. It is during one of these parties, the idea to create Vietnamese costumes for the very popular Barbie Doll is hatched. A housemaid is basically roped into creating these costumes with the idea being selling them to the wives, or husbands of those in Saigon to send back home. The funds made on the sales are to be used for the local orphanages, etc.
It all sounds good except for Charlene is very manipulative and hard to decide when or if she is being altruistic or self-serving. Put into context of women's limited roles beyond childbearing and husband's career supporting, watching Charlene work behind the scenes to make things happen is a wonder. Each time I thought Charlene was doing something incredibly kind or helpful, it was usually at the expense of someone less fortunate or without a voice.
We also meet Rainey, Charlene's young daughter. Per the standard of the time, Rainey is mostly seen and not heard (voiceless). Tricia is taken with the little girl and is maneuvered to take her off of Charlene's hands. Tricia enjoys Rainey but is aware that she is being manipulated by Charlene and moved away from the adults but she doesn't have the wherewithal to turn Charlene down or confront her over the situation.
Sixty years later and Rainey is now much older and has sought out the Octogenarian, Tricia. She wants to hear her version of that time in Saigon. Wants to know about her mother.
The first portion of the book is Tricia's recollections and we find out what she did with the rest of her life, post Vietnam. We also learn about Rainey's life as well.
Many questionably moral decisions are made during the time spent in Vietnam by Charlene and by acquiescence, Tricia. Also of note was the lack of autonomy for the women as examples of women being granted allowances with "pin money" and even where and how they spend their time.

An interesting Historical Fiction in that the characters were fictional, but certainly attitudes and mores were dead on accurate.
4.25 stars

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux title for granting me access to an early e-copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Absolution is a beautiful novel written with two perspectives, the first narrator is a young woman, Tricia, a shy, always wanting to please newlywed who moves to Saigon with her engineer husband in the very early 60s. Once there she tries to ingratiate herself into the ex-pat community and meets Charlene, a strongly confident mother of three who takes Tricia under her wing. The second narrator is Charlene’s daughter, who tells her story years later when she meets a Vietnam vet who knew her mother.

What I think McDermott does brilliantly in this novel is that while she is telling the story of the two women through their narrative, the main character is actually Charlene. Charlene’s character is so multi-faceted I think there is a scene that sums her character best when, after her funeral, her children are telling stories about her and their aunt asks if they even loved her. Charlene spends her time doing such good (like visiting leper colonies and orphanages) while having moral blindspots at the same time.

I fully enjoyed reading this novel, it is definitely one of my favorites of the year. The middle meandered a bit but I think it painted a picture of pre-American invasion Vietnam that I have not read before and gave me a view of the ex-pat world of Saigon that I didn’t even know existed. I do think I benefited from listening to the audio which was exceptionally well done and kept me engaged (with two different narrators). McDermott drew beautiful character portraits of all the women in this novel.

4.75 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC to review

Well I remember the duck-and-cover school drills from my post-World-War-II childhood when the hot war of my parents’ experience – she an Army nurse, he a military officer – had given way to the dormant tensions of the Cold War, when the threat of the Bomb hung over us like some sort of monster cloud ever ready to rain down Armageddon. And just as Stella, one of the subordinate but most interesting characters in Alice McDermott's provocative fictional rendition of those times, "Absolution," pronounces the school drills ridiculous, so I couldn't help wondering myself at the time just how much protection a desk or whatever else we might be huddling under would afford us from a blast so powerful as to defy comprehension.
An unflinching truth-teller, author McDermott's Stella, amid the Andy Griffith-and-Opie-with-fishing-rods images from the '50s or early '60s that those on the right would have us believe were the defining character of a time when blacks were being hosed down and strung up and otherwise regularly abused and gays, to the extent that they were seen at all outside the closet, were being rousted out and roughed up
like in the movie "The Detective."
And women! Suffice to recall how a male instructor in my college Social Psychology class had no compunction about citing to us as an example of gender differences how a woman might just break down and cry on you if you made too great demands of her, and a South African instructor in my Calculus class flinched not the slightest bit (this must have been around 1965) in telling a female student who dared to come to class in pants that he preferred his female students to dress in skirts (imagine her embarrassment!).
A time so different as to perhaps be inconceivable to young people today, those days of my young adulthood so vividly realized for me in McDermott's novel, which with its Southeast Asia focus recalled even more graphically for me those now long-ago days when I’d never heard of Vietnam and certainly couldn’t have found it on a map, though I do recall drawing my college roommate's attention to a Life or Look spread on the plight of helicopter pilots there. Still, a very distant thing it yet was for me, that quagmire which would end up killing some 58,000 Americans, though it would come knocking at my door soon enough and have me, like my parents, soldiering up. And while I didn't end up having to go to Vietnam myself, I took in with appropriate aghastness the accounts of guys who did have to go, including one who described the heat that hit him as he stepped off the plane at whatever garden spot he'd been delivered to – Saigon? Tan Son Nhut? – as being like having "a hot wet towel thrown in your face."
Hotter still, of course, the actual fighting, and not just tangentially for me, something simply observed from afar, but considerably more personal, with how it killed a couple of friends of mine, one a fellow ROTC member in my college dorm with whom I'd traded laughs about the inanities of some of our respective training experiences and the other an active-duty friend who had the same job specialty as I did, thereby giving his death something of a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God aspect for me. A particular resonance, then, those two deaths lent for me to that Life Magazine photo spread of a few years later showing all those who'd been killed in a single week in Vietnam when the fighting had reached a fever-pitch level.
Still a ways down the road, though, that level of carnage, for the characters in McDermott’s novel, which begins with her protagonist, Patricia, and her adviser husband arriving in country in Saigon in 1963, when it was still early enough in the war, she says, that you could almost believe that Americans had come over to Saigon simply to go shopping, with how that's how the wives mostly occupied themselves — that and worrying about runs in their stockings and rollers and bobby pins as well as just in general functioning as “helpmates” to their adviser husbands. Still something of a"lofty, exotic" adventure Saigon was in those days, she notes, even as she also notes that she and the other wives had all dutifully read "The Ugly American” and Graham Greene’s "The Quiet American," with its sentiments about American interventionism quite at odds with those espoused by American officialdom and pretty much bought hook, line and sinker by the wives.
Not so in-step with the others, though, is the most interesting character for me in the novel, Charlene, a maverick of sorts with a "regal and feral" air who commiserates with a bad moment for Patricia by letting loose with an epithet at a time when, as Patricia notes, women weren't given to using four-letter words – or at least not in public when casual profanity hadn't become as common as it is now. Reminiscent she was for me, Charlene, with her attitudes and outspokenness, of a fellow maverick, Alison Laithwaite, in the Amazon Prime Video series, ”The Last Post,” which I rewatched with great appreciation just the other day for its depiction of the last gasps of British colonialism and its unwavering conviction that, as with the American version, it was making life better for the people being subjugated if they could just be so enlightened as to appreciate what was being done for them.
Very Catholic, that presumption of rulers that they know what's best for the great unwashed, and indeed Patricia's husband tells her that the going joke in his circles is that the CIA is actually the Catholic Intelligence Agency. Fine with him, though, with how it pleases him that the U.S. is supporting a Catholic regime that is keeping godless communism at bay. Something "divinely ordained" he finds about the arrangement, even with the infamous remark of Madame Nhu, she of the form-fitting dresses and heavily penciled eyebrows, that she'd clap her hands if another Buddhist monk barbecued himself in protest of the governing regime. A bit of a rough alliance it made for, Peter acknowledges, to be embedded with such a regime, but nevertheless an alliance that “seemed to portend the redemption he so believed in – redemption not just for the Far East but for all the world."
And indeed there's something of that sentiment of America knowing what’s best for the rest of the world, of its even thinking that it can remake the world in its own image, that informs a campaign of Charlene's to turn over Vietnamese babies for adoption to American women, whom she sees as being better able to provide good lives for the babies. And not just an individual thing with her, the adoption initiative, but an actual official program dubbed Operation Babylift, which, as those of us of a certain age recall and as noted in the novel, was marked by a horrific plane crash in which 78 children were killed. A microcosm, indeed, the crash could be seen as for the whole Vietnam misadventure, with those now-iconic images from America's leave-taking of helicopter evacuations from Saigon rooftops and aircraft being dumped into the sea. A presage, even, the calamitous ending could be seen as for later U.S. involvements as well, most recently our departure from Afghanistan, with those images of people clinging to the sides of that departing U.S. plane.
Not that U.S. initiatives abroad have been universally bad – commendable, to my mind, our support of Ukraine – or that Catholicism doesn't have its finer or nobler moments. I was put in mind, for instance, in reading McDermott’s book, of a movie from those times which I recently rewatched, “The Cardinal,” with its depiction of a stony-faced Tom Tryon the picture of resoluteness as he journeys to the South to help a black priest with his desegregation efforts or as he chides a priest in Austria for seeming to be giving succor to the Reich. No disputing the worthiness of those initiatives, anyway, even if other aspects of the film put me off, and indeed it’s out of a similar notion of the Greater Good or a spirit of Catholic obligation that impels Patricia to teach at a kindergarten in Harlem. And be it out of a Catholic impulse or sheer simple humanitarianism, there’s no faulting the impulse that drives Charlene to help with a leper colony or Stella to journey to Birmingham to help register voters and advocate for integration, initially with Patricia in tow.
Reminiscent her trip was for me of a black college roommate of mine the summer of the Washington civil rights march who set off for the event despite my warning him that it might hurt his studies to be away from them for even a short while, this being a time when, unlike with today's run-away grade inflation, professors took no prisoners – indeed, I was on academic probation myself at the time. So not unwarranted, my note of caution to him, though now, several assassinations and the Birmingham bombing and other outrages of the period later, I've come to think that sometimes external events are indeed of such gravity as to override other immediate personal concerns – a change in perspective not a little buttressed by my reading McDermott’s book.
So something more than just a good read it made for me, with my having identified so forcefully with some of its parts that this review has ended up being more of a personal essay. Which, for all the possible criticism that I've appropriated her book for my own purposes, nevertheless strikes me as the mark of a truly good novel, that it makes for precisely the sort of strong reader identification that Joan Didion, say, always made for me with that distinctive voice of hers, and in fact I heard echoes of her voice in McDermott's novel, as well as echoes of another favorite writer of mine, Ellen Feldman, whose “The Unwitting" remains for me the best novel I’ve ever read about the Cold War.
So with the caveats that I'd have liked to have seen more of Stella’s excursion down South and my not being entirely certain that a dual narrative line adds anything to a novel served well enough by Patricia’s narration alone, I'm disposed to give the novel the strongest possible recommendation, especially for anyone with a background similar to my own. If, like me, you grew up in the postwar years and are put off by those who would make those times better than they were, as if the abuses of blacks that spawned the Civil Rights movement never happened and Vietnam was just a momentary hiccup along the way toward some greater moment for America, if, in short, you're enough of a realist not to doubt the evidence of your own eyes, be it about what happened on Jan. 6 or the havoc that we’re seeing now with the weather (tell the people in Phoenix that climate change is just a liberal fabrication), if, in other words, you're a rational, compassionate human being who appreciates well-done, provocative fiction, then McDermott’s book is for you.

Review “Absolution” by Alice McDermott

In the 1960s, Patricia “Tricia” moves to Saigon with her new husband, a young attorney who has a job with navy intelligence. Tricia is eager to excel in her new role as wife and - hopefully - mother until she meets Charlene and her daughter at a garden party. Quickly, Tricia is pulled into Charlene’s efforts to “do good” for the local population and finds herself torn between playing the dutiful housewife or the philanthropic savior of the poor.

McDermott tells the story of these two women through letters exchanged between Tricia and Charlene’s daughter decades after they left Vietnam. The novel shines a light on a usually hidden perspective of the Vietnam war. Instead of diving into the politics of the war McDermott lifts the curtain of the domestic underbelly of the American presence in Vietnam. The “helpmeets” - wives and local staff - take center stage in this account. Even though this is a historical novel it raises important questions about altruism and philanthropy in general.

I really enjoyed this novel, the new perspective, the unusual subject. It was vivid and beautifully written. This was my first Alice McDermott novel and I think I will be reading more of her work.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks to @netgalley for providing this digital ARC!

This book is hands down my favorite read of this year. Masterfully written, Alice McDermott wielded a story from long ago that most of us try to forget. Based off of seemingly true accounts from Vietnam the story follows “Tricia” and Charlene— wives of prominent government men. They’re trails and tribulations of marriage, motherhood and expat-hood.. It was heartbreaking and beautiful. A true gem of work. I would absolutely recommend this book to any book lover.

A huge thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
I just reviewed Absolution by Alice McDermott. #Absolution #NetGalley

After hearing Ann Patchett rave about this book, I knew I had to read it. She did not steer me wrong.

It’s 1963 and the timid Tricia is in Saigon, a helpmeet to her U.S. government-contracted husband. She is swept up into the frenzy of charities and projects of another American wife, Charlene. Tricia recounts her experience during this year from the present day to Charlene’s grown daughter, who has crossed paths with a man from their time in Vietnam, and they each reflect on their lives and the people they knew.

This story is enthralling, beautifully written, and at times unbelievably heartwrenching. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the focus on the women from America and the Vietnamese women they encounter,
in a context that is domestic rather than militaristic, is extraordinary and novel. I could not put it down!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for sharing an advance copy of this new novel. I’m definitely an outlier in Netgalley reviews on this one. I finished the book, but I felt it to be a struggle, it just didn’t keep my attention. I don’t think I really go it, at the end, I felt let down and like it was unfinished or could have been more. Just not for me, I think.

Absolution was my first McDermott, and there is no doubt she is an incredible writer. Told mostly through letters wrriten after the fact, we learn the story of Tricia and Charlene, two "do gooder" wives living in Saigon in 1963. The pair seek out to "help" the people of Vietnam with their dolls and candy and later in life reflect on what, if any, good they actually did.

I didn't like this story per say, but I liked this book if that makes any sense at all. A lot of what was happening in Vietnam and how its residents are viewed made me very uncomfortable, and thats the point. Even though that is the point, something is giving me pause and stropping me from giving this 5 stars. I think sometimes our white women were a bit let off the hook. Books where characters have hindsight is something I love, and that's whole point of Absolution. The women's inconsequential good is much more selfish than selfless, and it took hindsight for them to realize that. Were they trying to repair the world or repair themselves? Is it possible to do both?

Ann Patchett called this book the best of 2023 and believe sit should win the Pulitzer. While I'm not quite there, I still recommend this book and so grateful to have read it!

'There's a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing'.

Tricia is a newlywed who finds herself newly placed in Vietnam in the early 1960s. There are, of course, a whole gaggle of dependents; wives and children of men who've been recruited to lend an American hand to the war with the North. But, Tricia sees herself simply as a support to her husband, 'but my real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband'. However, her self-conscious days of sidelining herself at cocktail parties come to an abrupt end when she meets Charlene. Charlene is a dynamo. Charlene is everything Tricia isn't. Charlene subsumes Tricia into her world of charity, 'self-sacrifice is never really selfless. It is often quite selfish'.

'Absolution' examines the role of women, acceptance, value, and moral obligation, under the intense, hot, humid environment of Vietnam, 'I recall our hubris...our Western centrism enhanced, inflated'. Its epistolary design lends the story a memoir-like quality. Memories that refract upon reflection. The conflation of charity and good deeds with egotism, juxtaposed with turning away completely, 'who wants to gaze at suffering?'

I've never read anything by Alice McDermott before, but I just loved this book. It works on so many different levels: historical fiction, contemporary fiction, and literary fiction. There is naivety yet wisdom, cultural paradigms yet independence. It is a faceted crystal. Anyone who enjoys thought-provoking characters, beyond a storyline-driven book, will adore this read.

Alice McDermott's Absolution is an amazing book that takes the reader back to the days when wives were to be seen and not heard, when complex issues seemed simple, and doing good meant stopping the spread of communism. Absolution shows us a rarely seen side of Vietnam, and not the black and white approach that got America into the war. It is the story of American women who are there as the "helpmates" of their working husbands as they fight the onslaught of communism. In the opening pages, we read: "There were so many cocktail parties in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties, nonetheless. You have no idea what it was like. For us. The wives."


It is the story of two very different wives, Tricia, a much in love newlywed and Charlene, sophisticated, bossy, take charge type. a leader, a party goer. Under that veneer, she is a conniving do-gooder. In 1963 Vietnam, these women and their friends were clueless about what was really happening, clueless about the burns on children and backed a corrupt Catholic government. Yet, these two women, seemingly so different, form a complex relationship. Led by Charlene, they want to do good when wives are to be seen, not heard. In their stifling environment they do little things, trying to improve the lives of children one by one.

Looking back after 60 years, Tricia and Charlene's daughter, catch up and reflect. As is much of the book, their reflections are heartfelt and poignant, and "doing good" takes on a different picture.

McDermott is known for Catholic themes in her book...BUT you don't need to be Catholic to love and appreciate this wonderfully written novel. It should definitely be a Pulitzer nominee.

Alice McDermott has produced another fine piece of literature. Her characters are well-developed, with a plot line that loops the reader continually back around to the striving for absolution. Traditionally minor characters during the 1950s-1970s, women are, in fact, the major players in this novel set in Vietnam in the lead=up to the US involvement in the Vietnam war. Tricia and Charlene, both "helpmeets" to their husbands, are women who want to "do good," and find various charitable ways and methods to achieve that in the poor country of Vietnam. The book is composed of Tricia's writing about the time to Charlene's daughter, and the daughter's brief response. Both seem to be seeking absolution throughout their lives. While an easy read, it leaves a lasting imprint.

My first Alice McDermott and definitely not my last. Equal parts heartfelt and off putting, you kind of feel like a frog in a pot reading this one. McDermott knows how to create a very evocative, unsettling atmosphere and the subject matter of GIs living in Saigon during the Vietnam War is her backdrop. She also covers what it meant to be a “help meet” wife to an ambitious man in the late 50s/early 60s and it sounds… so awful. You can feel the mess of the situation in the mc’s voice but it’s also painful to hear them wise up, because they’re seriously deluded in their white savior glory. Such a satisfying slow burn. Highly recommend but check the trigger warnings.

This is a stunning book. In its simplest description, it is a book about the wives of businessmen and military men in Vietnam in 1963. And it is brilliant in its painting of this time and and place and people. But Absolution is so much more. This is a novel about the ways of being a woman in the world then, and now. It is a novel about how we reconcile desire with reality. It is a novel about the moral obligations we hold to ourselves and others.
The structure of the novel is epistolary (but not glaringly so), with a directed form of address that implicates who is being spoken to in the novel and draws the reader in. It moves through time in ways that allows the reader to recognize the changing nature of the world and the wry way we can look back on our past selves with a discerning eye and a bit of chagrin. On every page, there were bits of description or introspection that made me pause and utter an internal, "Yes, that's right." In all, it's a great book, one of McDermott's finest (and that's saying something).

I could tell from page one that this book would be good but it turned out to be outstanding. McDermott really nails all the descriptions of how life "'used to be" and raises some interesting questions - is it worth trying to do good even if it's just a tiny bit. Mostly set in Vietnam in the early 60th I learned a lot about the country.

It’s 1963 in Vietnam and newlywed Tricia is attempting to fit in with the other military and corporate wives in Saigon. Absolution is set in the present with Tricia writing to her “friend” Charlene’s daughter to describe events at that time and the repercussions that were felt even decades later.
The writing was wonderfully descriptive in this layered character-driven story!
*Thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux and NetGalley for the advance reader review copy

I hate when I’m the first naysayer amongst a flood of fabulous 5 star reviews but…I found myself struggling a bit to stay excited about this story. I found parts really slow and maybe the formality of the epistolary format didn’t work for me. There certainly were extremely moving parts (burned children in the hospital) and McDermott certainly gets the time period. I am sure many will love this one but it didn’t quite work for me.

Such an extraordinary novel, first for the characters created and the stories told, but also for the primary setting, Saigon in 1963, and for the various themes, summed up by the title. Read slowly with great care, because small details turn out to be very significant. What’s it about? Love and evil. Also being a parent, being a wife, being an innocent, being good. The main character is Patricia, a shy young bride…besotted with her husband. This is not a loss of innocence story exactly, perhaps better described as an account of wisdom acquired. It’s not a political novel, only as much as the ex-pat community in Saigon are there for political and ideological reasons.
Perhaps McDermotts best novel ever, and that’s saying a lot.

Alice McDermott's Absolution is a beautifully-written historical novel set in Saigon during the time period when the U.S. had military advisors not combat troops in Vietnam but interestingly is not told from the perspective of these men. McDermott takes us into the lives of two memorable characters - Tricia and Charlene, young American women whose husbands are stationed in Saigon in 1963.

Tricia is a demure newlywed who has recently arrived with her engineer husband "on loan" to the Navy - self-conscious and unsure of herself as she tries to adjust to this new life in Vietnam. She soon meets Charlene at an embassy party and the more experienced woman draws Tricia into her "cabal" of do-gooder American wives and their various fundraising projects in Saigon. (One of these projects involves selling Barbie dolls outfitted in Vietnamese clothing which was quite interesting given the prominence of Barbie in popular discourse this summer.) The country club lives of the Americans with their cocktail parties, servants and gated homes is juxtaposed against the poverty and hardship that the Vietnamese are experiencing during the ongoing conflict between South Vietnam and the Communists of the North. The story of these two women is unfurled as a series of letters 60 years later between Tricia and Charlene's daughter, Rainey, who was a young child during the Vietnam years. After meeting a veteran who knew her mother in Vietnam, Rainey felt the need to reach out to Tricia. Tricia tells Rainey about their time in Saigon and also reminisces about growing up in New York.

McDermott has written a captivating and thought-provoking examination of moral ambiguities. Over the course of the novel, the question is raised many times of who actually benefits from actions that are intended to be morally good. Were they trying to heal the world or trying to heal themselves? Are good deeds merely a quest for absolution? Also raised is the issue of "inconsequential good" asking whether good deeds actually have an impact of any consequence as well as the recognition that good intentions can have far-reaching and unintended consequences. This moral ambiguity of actions applies to individuals but is also a subtle observation on the motivations of the US government and what they were trying to accomplish in Vietnam. It is with hindsight that Tricia considers these questions.

The novel also provides insight into the life of women in the '60s. The women at the centre of this story were intelligent, educated women yet were still expected to defer to their husbands and were limited in what they could do. Tricia aspires to be a mother and a "helpmeet" to her husband but has no real ambitions or expectations of her own. Charlene's all-encompassing altruism is no doubt fueled by her need to channel her intelligence and ambition into something that will make a difference.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Alice McDermott's Absolution - it's a quiet, insightful story told with compassion - highly recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sending a digital ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.