Absolution

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.

American womenAmerican wiveshave been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but inAbsolutionthey take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the eras mandate to be helpmeets to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to do good for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlenes daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlenes altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the peripheryof politics, of history, of war, of their husbands convictionshave been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed Americas tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.

Hardcover, Oct 31st 2023