American women have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Alice McDermott’s Absolution they 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 1963 Saigon, the two form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter reaches out to Tricia and together they look back at their time in Saigon, revisiting that pivotal time and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery – of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions – have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia. Moderated by VIRGINIA HARTMAN, author of The Marsh Queen: A Novel.
An Evening With Alice McDermott on Absolution
