‘Absolution’ asks if ‘doing good’ can cover for lack of empathy

Alice McDermott is known for fiction that probes the lives of working- and middle-class Irish Catholic families in New York’s outer boroughs and Long Island. Her exquisitely observed stories of weddings, wakes, marriages, births, sorrows, and joys are underpinned by questions of moral responsibility and forgiveness. 

McDermott’s powerful ninth novel, “Absolution,” is at once an exciting departure and a fitting development. Set primarily in Saigon in 1963, shortly before the United States’ full involvement in the Vietnam War, the book focuses on the wives stationed overseas with their American husbands. Their job was to support and “adorn” their spouses rather than question their business. (Among other things, “Absolution” offers a sharp-eyed portrait of the changing face of American marriage.)

“Absolution” is partly a response to Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” which depicts the breakdown of French colonialism in Vietnam and America’s early involvement there against the backdrop of an unsettling love triangle. In contrast to Greene’s male-dominated narrative, McDermott’s novel features women – at least, American women – at its center. 

She frames “Absolution” with an engrossing, elegiac correspondence between two of these women nearly 60 years after the events in question. This adds the benefit of hindsight to the women’s attempts to sort out their experiences in Vietnam. The correspondents who narrate alternating sections of the three-part novel are Tricia and Rainey. As a shy, naive 23-year-old newlywed in 1963, Tricia  accompanied her husband, Peter, a lawyer and engineer, to Saigon. Rainey is the daughter of Tricia’s best friend there – wealthy, confident Charlene, wife of an oil executive. 

In the novel’s opening pages, which could be titled, “How I Met Your Mother,” Tricia paints a vivid portrait of Charlene – a wily, athletic mother of three with piercing green eyes, fingernails bitten down to the nubs, and a “predator’s eyebrows.” They meet at one of the frequent cocktail parties that filled expats’ calendars. 

Charlene has brought along her school-age daughter, Rainey, and her infant son, whom Charlene quickly hands off to the pliant newcomer. Tricia is mortified when the baby spits up all over her silk dress, causing her to miss most of the party while a Vietnamese servant deftly cleans her up. But she is enchanted by Rainey’s Barbie doll and marvels that, unlike the baby dolls she played with as a child, this doll “was meant for a thousand different imaginary games: nurse, stewardess, plantation belle, sorority girl, night club singer ... bride.” Of course, Barbie doctor and Barbie lawyer dolls were not yet in the picture. (The toys, which feature prominently in “Absolution,” are having a moment in the wake of the “Barbie” movie.)

Charlene is a woman who, born 30 years later, might have run a major corporation. But in her era, she is limited to concocting elaborate schemes in a desire to do good and do something other than just stay at home. Charlene comes up with a plan to produce and sell “Saigon Barbies” at exorbitant prices to wealthy Americans. The Saigon Barbies are dressed in Vietnamese silk costumes that have been meticulously sewn, for a small fee, by the nimble woman who set Tricia to rights at the cocktail party. The proceeds go toward gift baskets of stuffed animals and candy for Vietnamese children in orphanages and hospitals.   

Not everyone thinks Charlene’s charitable efforts are worthwhile. A major’s wife argues that “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.” But Charlene pushes back, insisting that doing even a little good is better than giving in to the impulse to turn away.

The novel’s setting, in a country soon to become a battleground for conflicting ideologies – a war driven in no small part by economics and a lust for oil – provides an excellent canvas for an examination of moral equivocation that has marked much of McDermott’s work. Saintly people in this novel, as in her others, come in all forms, including a scruffy, retired Army medic who returns to the jungle to do what he can to help, and the gentle Vietnam veteran who, with his wife, in late middle age, adopt a baby with Down syndrome.  

Sometimes knowing what’s the right thing to do is impossible, and so is absolution. Such is the case with Tricia’s dilemma over whether adopting a Vietnamese baby girl born into dire poverty will save the child from suffering and relieve the birth family of a burden, or cause them more sorrow.  

In her 2006 novel, “After This,” McDermott wrote about the lasting effects of the death of a son in Vietnam on each member of a Catholic family on Long Island. But she is up to something different here. “Absolution” is not about the war but addresses the question of forgiveness on both a personal and political level. Few writers have written about moral qualms with such sensitivity.