Damage and Absolution, from Saigon to the Suburbs

A central character in Alice McDermott’s new novel Absolution, looking back across the years, recalls how she and her husband entered married life. “One thing we were certain of, looking toward the future: we didn’t want our parents’ lives. And then we did.”

This cycle of generational rebellion and reconciliation, and the longing for absolution felt on both sides of the divide, is one of the many layers of meaning that McDermott explores in her book. It’s a theme both eternal and timely, arriving at yet another moment when our zeitgeist is saturated with generational conflict over wars, politics, music, media, even the language we use to talk about these flashpoints.

Underlying all these battles is an insistent question with a long tail in both history and literature: Who is to blame? Who gets the rap? Can today’s young people pin the chaos and violence of our world and the inner turmoil of our lives on Baby Boomers – a generation of people too steeped in self-regard, too convinced of their good intentions, to see the harm they were inflicting or ignoring? Do the Boomers deserve this opprobrium? Or did they do the best they could with what was at hand? And will their youthful accusers, no less certain of their virtue, live to experience their own moment of doubt, regret and indictment?

When I picked up Absolution, I was drawn to it at first as a cautionary tale about America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam and what that has to say about our country’s role in the world today. It’s a theme I have long thought about, and tried to explore in my own (far less accomplished) novel, set in the same era as McDermott’s book, which led my wife to suggest I read it.

But there’s much more here. It’s true that the setting for Absolution is Saigon in 1963, and the story revolves around a group of American wives who are there to serve as “helpmeets” to their husbands, men trying to prop up a weak, feckless regime and defeat a communist insurgency. As they take on this hopeless task, the women occupy themselves – when they’re not socializing at cocktail parties – in something equally futile and presumptuous: trying to provide a healing balm of western beneficence through small acts of charity. (Oddly, Barbie – the doll – is also a character.)

This narrative thread suggests one meaning for the title: the need of absolution for the destructive folly of the American experience in Indochina. But McDermott has other ideas. “When I hear people say this is a novel about the Vietnam War, I say, ‘No it’s not,’” she said at an event at Washington’s Politics & Prose bookstore in November. She is also writing about the need for absolution on a more granular level, and it is here that the novel achieves a timelessness untethered to its specific setting. This is ultimately a book about personal relationships, and personal damage: damaged people, damage done to other people, and the effort to heal – or deny the need for healing – through trying to “fix” someone else. By the time the novel runs its course, spanning more than 60 years, there’s plenty that needs forgiveness.

Most of the book is narrated by Tricia, the wife of a Navy spy. But the dynamic center of the story is Charlene, the spouse of an American oil executive who – like many of the men there – may also be working with or for the CIA. “Regal and feral,” as McDermott describes her, Charlene is constantly hatching schemes to help damaged Vietnamese – sick and wounded children, orphans, unwed mothers, even lepers. These maneuvers cost money, which Charlene raises through a variety of sub rosa methods, ranging from black-market deals to outright theft – what she calls “the five-finger discount.” All this frenetic activity serves Charlene’s unending efforts to avoid facing her own demons, which she keeps at bay with alcohol and tranquilizers.

Absolution is written as an exchange of letters between Tricia and Charlene’s daughter Rainey, many years after they left Vietnam. Both still harbor grievances. Tricia has regrets about her easy acceptance of Charlene’s imperious manner in co-opting her into her projects, and for settling so willingly for the role of enabler to her upwardly mobile husband Peter – for surrendering her agency so easily first to Peter and again to Charlene. In that sense, Tricia stands in for all the American wives in Saigon, pushed to the margins by their husbands and the gender strictures of the era, with plenty of time on their hands, easy prey for Charlene and her ceaseless machinations.

Rainey has her own uneasy memories, of her mother’s controlling ways, and of a lingering sense of abandonment that resurfaces when Charlene dies young. When an aunt questions whether she ever really loved her mother, Rainey says she realized that her feelings for her had been entirely physical. Her strongest memories of Charlene, she tells Tricia, are of her mother reaching out to grasp her chin and turning her attention to something she wanted Rainey to understand, or embrace, or do. “Directing my eyes, literally and figuratively, with the iron grip of her thin hand.”

Tricia enters a posthumous plea on Charlene’s behalf, urging understanding, tolerance and, well, a kind of absolution. “You have no idea what it was like,” Tricia writes to Rainey. “For us. The women, I mean. The wives.”

No one really can know, of course, unless they experienced it. Not only in the Saigon of the early 1960s, but anywhere, any time. We live our life going forward, Kierkegaard told us, but we only understand it looking backward. A judgment that may seem appropriate, even obvious, across the distance of time may have been anything but that in the moment. 

And Rainey seems to get this. She comes across as a thoughtful person who possesses a capacity for self-reflection that may have eluded her more driven mother. She recalls her youthful contempt for American motives in Vietnam as “truth salted and sweetened, of course, with the arrogance of youth … all our ideas about the world made absolutely delicious by what we were certain no one before us had ever known or understood.”

She writes of her regret in adding a gratuitous dig to her mother’s obituary, calling her a clotheshorse, a seemingly innocuous term that she knew Charlene had regarded as an insult.

And she remembers a moment of cluelessness, right after her first child was born, telling her mother how much she loved her baby as if she was sharing a great revelation – “as if no woman had ever discovered this before, what it was to be in love with your child. Your own.”

Charlene responds with another moment of pure physicality, Rainey writes, cupping her daughter’s chin and turning her face to look out “on our elegant patio, our green garden, our lofty sunstruck trees: our family’s gorgeous little universe built on compromise, of course; ill-gotten gains, I suppose; bargains with the Devil, no doubt. But also luck, grace. Whatever it took to get us, to keep us, safely home.”

Whatever it took. This may not be the most elegant plea for absolution ever made. But it has the virtue of being real, in real time.

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.