Alice McDermottAnmeldelser

3.5 stars.

A take on some of the multi-generational ripples of war, from the wives perspective. Spanning decades, an 80ish year old woman looks back at her time in Vietnam early in the American part of the war.

Early 1960’s and Kennedy is President when young men both military and civilians with families were sent to Saigon to help the Soth Vietnamese defend democracy. Novel is told from the wives point of view who are left alone while the husbands do important things. Charlene, a force among the mostly passive women wants to do good but also make a little side money. Rachel new to Saigon and childless falls in with Charlene’s side hustle and begins to see South Vietnam from a different perspective than her husband. The ambiguity of what the US wants to foster in Vietnam is played with but mostly we see the wives POV. Interesting book and a reminder how straight we all once were.

In all but length, I found this a very slight novel with little of interest in terms of plot, characters, and theme. The writing is controlled, a little too prettily polished, and even slightly phoney. I expected more and ultimately rate it an inconsequential piece.½

Really enjoyed this book to see the Vietnam War from a young American bride's perspective and trying to fit into life in Saigon.

Tricia is a young wife who accompanied her husband to Saigon. It's 1963, and the expat life of garden parties, evening drinks and children attending the international school while living in lavish homes cared for by local help is still normal. Tricia, by nature a good girl who grew up working class Catholic in Yonkers, is ready to do her part to help her husband's career. She's naturally shy, but keenly observant and she falls in easily with Charlene, a woman with goals and plans and the forceful nature needed to carry them out. She's quickly co-opted into Charlene's work, at first bringing toys to hospitalized children (and cigarettes to their parents), then into a plan that involves trips out to a leper colony. But the war is becoming something that can't be ignored and Tricia is forced into looking at how the very best of intentions can do harm.

The novel takes the form of letters written between Tricia and Charlene's daughter, in which Tricia explains how people thought and acted in that time and place, through the lens of what we now know. It's a balancing act, to tell the story of a woman in 1963, through her eyes then and now and McDermott is able to make that work. Charlene's actions, and therefore many of Tricia's were what we would look at now with a critical eye, as does the present day Tricia, looking closely at how what they were doing was just feel-good work for a large part, but also work that sometimes did real good and sometimes real harm. McDermott's characters seem fairly simple on the surface, but there's a lot of complexity under the surface. I will be thinking about the characters and the choices they made for some time. I recommend going into this book knowing as little as possible about it ahead of time.½

" Alice McDermott has always been on of our greatest writers, but here she exceeds every expectation. Absolution is one of the finest contemporary novels I've read. It is a moral masterpiece." Ann Patchett,

In the sixteen short pieces collected here, Alice McDermott touches upon a variety of themes relevant to the writing life. Or, more simply, life. Not strictly a self-help book for writers, it nevertheless reveals numerous lessons she has learned both as an accomplished novelist and as a teacher of would-be novelists.

She writes in an engaging fashion that is always readable, full of insight and wit. And in passing it is often highly illuminating. I especially liked the essays, “What About the Baby?,” and “Only Connect (Eventually)”.

Gently recommended for the would-be novelist in all of us.

After reading The Ninth Hour and Someone, and giving them 4.5 stars and 4 stars respectively, I was disappointed in Absolution. Though it takes place in Vietnam in 1963, this is not a story of war, but rather one of friendship between Tricia and Charlene . Tricia is a shy, newlywed who accompanies her husband to Saigon, Charlene is outgoing, has three children and has been married for some years. The two meet in Saigon, and Charlene takes Tricia under her wing. While Charlene is a friend, she is also manipulative and cunning. The two try to do charitable work for those native to Saigon. There are tender moments, and some less so. The ending was abrupt, and I was left feeling let down. Nonetheless, I will look forward to more of the author's books.

3.5 stars
I enjoyed the writing and the sense of time and place that the author created. I was disappointed with the ending when the story switched to Rainy's voice. It wasn't as interesting for me.

This is an engaging novel by Alice McDermott, an author whose observations of her characters are always astute. This novel begins in the early 1960s in Saigon when wives were permitted to live with their military husbands when they were deployed overseas. Tricia is newly married to an attorney on loan to navy intelligence. She is somewhat in awe of other wives who seem confident in their roles as military wives. It was an era when women were expected to be "helpmeets" and subservient. She then meets Charlene whose personality runs counter to the women she has met - Charlene runs her household efficiently with little input from her husband. She is also a self-appointed purveyor of gifts for those less fortunate and enlists Tricia's help in the acquisition and distribution.

Charlene has three children and Tricia forms an immediate bond with her young daughter. Many years later their memories are told in epistolary form. Charlene's charitable endeavors are simultaneously well intentioned and self-serving. Their histories as revealed in the letters are fascinating.

My husband is a former Military Intelligence officer, so I am familiar with the obligations of a young military wife. As with the military itself, there were both tacit and spoken expectations for the wives. It is an experience I cherish because it led to life-long friendships.

Really liked it. This could come off as not much happening kind of book, but it's so well written and there's much going on. It's kind of character development and contradictions in the sixties where people were trying to do good (sometimes) and make a difference in Vietnam within parameters we don't always understand now. How far will you go to do what you think is needed? Or when do you speak up and stand your ground and how?

A peculiar beautifully written book, her writing to me is reminstant of [a:Markus Zusak|11466|Markus Zusak|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1537240528p2/11466.jpg]. It was interesting to learn about the nursing nuns as it was something completely new to me especially in the setting of NYC. The city doesn't play a huge role in the book which is actually nice since so many books turn the city into a character itself which it doesn't need to be. Weird but good is the best way to describe it.

Excellent book. Set in Vietnam before the actual war started. Rainy, Tricia, Dom and Charlene are all impacted in different ways by their time in Vietnam.

Told from one point of view, contemporaneously and looking back, Patricia reflects on her time as a naive newlywed in Saigon at the beginning of the US involvement in the Vietnam war. I admire McDermott's spare language and discipline in sticking to Patricia's reflections of a powerful period in her life when she became part of Charlene's "cabal".

This is my first book by the author Alice McDermott. The book is beautifully written. Most books about Vietnam take place in the late 1960s and revolve around the men fighting. This book takes place in 1963 Saigon and focuses on two wives, Charlene and Tricia. Their husbands are both civilians working for companies and the military in the early years of the Vietnam war. This is right before the US gets heavily involved in the conflict, before the protests and revolutions. The wives were there to be "helpmeets" to their husband and engage solely in social gatherings or charities.
The book was a little bit slow for me. It was told through a letter to Charlene's now adult daughter. It was more of a character development and not a story filled with action. However, I enjoyed reading it and learning more about what life was like for the women living overseas during this timeframe. I received a complimentary ebook through Netgalley.com in exchange for a review.½

From the flyleaf: "American women - American wives - have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage." Tricia is a young newlywed told by society and her father, to be a good "helpmeet" to her new husband, a young lawyer on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene, is used to being a corporate wife and mother of three. In Saigon at the beginning of the War in 1963, Charlene adds Tricia to her group of military wives trying to do good for the Vietnam people while also being practiced in the art of looking well put together in the unrelenting heat, having and going to cocktail parties, writing formal notes, etc. There is so much going on in this beautiful book. It reminded me so much of my Mother who completely supported my father in his job, moving without complaint and entertaining constantly and beautifully the people that worked with my father. It's hard to imagine in this day and age that was a wife's main job along with raising children. Beautifully written and highly recommended!

In 1963 Saigon, before the full fledged American involvement in Vietnam, two wives of husbands working in Saigon meet and develop a friendship of sorts. Tricia, a young, socially awkward woman from Yonkers is married to an engineer working with the US Navy. Charlene, mother of three, is socially aware, and hellbent on relieving some of the misery she sees around her with charitable gifts of toys, food, and clothing. Tricia’s life’s sadness is that she desperately wants to have a child but experiences multiple miscarriages. She strikes up a relationship with Charlene’s daughter, Rainey, whose Barbie doll becomes the inspiration for one of Charlene’s schemes to raise money for her gifts. The story is told in retrospective, from two POVs, that of the elderly Tricia and the middle aged Rainey via correspondence between the two.

This is a beautifully written, observant story that is both compelling and disturbing. Here is the life of women in the early 1960s when a wife’s role was to be a “help meet” for her husband. I loved how Tricia’s memories point out some of the absurdities of a woman’s life in those days.

Here also are the provocative thoughts and actions of America’s presence and role in Vietnam in that era as well as the plight of the Vietnamese citizens destined to be house workers for the Americans and living in poverty under the threat and fear of attacks. Who can forget that devastating photo of the young girl burned by napalm? Tricia certainly can’t.

The characterizations are strong and there is an evocative sense of time and place. As a memoir, this postulates that there is “no such thing as a life without regret”; how do we find release or absolution from the consequences of those regrets?

The more I think about this book, the better I like it.

Thanks to #netgalley and @fsgbooks for the ARC.

This novel focuses on two women and the time they spent in Saigon in 1963 at the dawn of the Vietnam War. The young, shy, and insecure Patricia is newly married to Peter, “a civilian advisor.” She desperately wants a family but in the meantime is focused on being a helpmeet for her husband. Charlene is her foil: a mother of three and a confident, take-charge dynamo, she manipulates Patricia into helping with her many charity projects which prove to be well-meaning but misguided.

Patricia is exactly the type of wife society expected at that time. She is loyal and dutiful, focused on catering to Peter’s needs. Though educated, she does little of consequence: writing letters, shopping, attending lectures and cocktail parties, taking afternoon naps, and making herself pretty for her husband. Certainly the verb obey was part of her marriage vows; Charlene points out that Patricia won’t go to church without her husband’s permission. She asks few questions and, in fact, doesn’t even know exactly what Peter’s job is.

What stands out about Patricia is her naivety and trust in her husband. She encounters a young girl in agony with burns, but only years later makes the connection between her odd burns and the use of napalm. There’s a very revealing comment she makes at one point, talking both about her Catholic faith and American support for a Catholic regime in Vietnam: “our sense that we were a part of the one true faith was pretty solid in those days. Or maybe I should say that mine was solid because I so trusted my husband to be right.” Of course, she is not the only naïve one: “Whatever mention these women made of the days they’d all spent as dependents in Vietnam was usually of the little did we know sort.”

Charlene, on the other hand, is the spunky rebel. Obviously intelligent and ambitious but with no career into which she could channel her energy, she devotes herself to helping the Vietnamese: she raises money to distribute gifts to hospitals and even visits a leper colony. Patricia thinks that the term “’white savior’” is an apt description of Charlene. She wants to do something “’to stand against that very little evil – that impulse to turn away.’” The problem is that Charlene’s altruistic ventures are not well thought out. She just plows ahead without giving consideration to what the people really need or want. Certainly, she never asks.

Her altruism is suspect. The reader will remember what Patricia is told by a friend’s aunt: “’self-sacrifice is never really selfless. It’s often quite selfish.’” So it’s logical to wonder whether Charlene is doing good deeds to really help people or to help herself. Is she trying to repair the world or mend herself? Certainly, her ego and status get a boost from her acts. Because of her position and lifestyle, certainly a contrast to that of the Vietnamese, does she feel an obligation to help or is she trying to assuage some sense of guilt? Her polar opposite is Dominic, especially when the reader learns about his son Jamie.

She has no difficulty using people for her schemes; for instance, she sees a maid’s skills as a seamstress and immediately coerces her into sewing áo dái, Vietnamese tunics, to dress Barbies. The maid, whose name is Ly but Charlene always calls Lily, is never asked what she thinks of this idea of Saigon Barbies or if she wants to help. And Charlene’s plan to encourage Americans to adopt Vietnamese children is as morally questionable as Canada’s Sixties Scoop involving Indigenous children.

Patricia does experience some personal growth. At the end of her sojourn in Saigon, she expresses anger at “everyone in my life who had considered my opinions inconsequential, who had lied to me or ignored me or manipulated me for what they considered my own benefit . . . those who’d set out to do good on my behalf.” Peter and Charlene both treat her this way so her anger is justified, but how much more so is that of the Vietnamese people, the recipients of Charlene and Patricia’s “efforts at inconsequential good”?

Of course, Charlene’s misguided altruism parallels the mistakes of American involvement in Vietnam. Convinced she knows what is good for the people, she just moves ahead without consultation, just as the American government, seeing Vietnam’s reunification as a strategic and economic disaster, justified its presence with anti-communism rhetoric and downplayed protests, like the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, against the increasingly unpopular Diệm regime. And until the end, Patricia accepts Charlene’s explanations, just as Americans accepted their government’s.

This is a complex novel which offers much for the reader to ponder: the conflict between societal expectations and personal desires, the meaning of genuine altruism, the unintended consequences of good intentions, and a country’s need for absolution for past actions. It would not suffer from a second reading. My only hesitation is that I found reading it a struggle at times; the pace is slow and parts are repetitious.

Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DCYakabuski).

A gem. Perfect.

I have long been a fan of Alice McDermott. Absolution is a masterpiece. What more can I say? This is a novel the world needs, now, and ever. I loved these characters as they endeavored to heal a broken world by doing all the good they can in the limited ways they could.

Patricia was a young wife when she and her husband arrived in Saigon in 1963. She appears conventional and her values are traditional; she wants to be a good helpmate to her husband and longs to be a mother. But she has been drawn to more radical women.

Her friend in youth was impelled by her slave-owning roots to become involved in Civil Rights activism in the South. Her new friend Charlene, a wife and mother living in Saigon, brashly breaks the rules to raise money for charitable acts, taking gifts to civilians in the hospital and making new clothes for those in the leper colony. They are helped by Dominic, a young soldier with a wife and child. He shares his great love by volunteering at the hospital.

In old age, Patricia is contacted by Charlene’s daughter. Patricia shares her story, and learns the story of her old friend and her continuing acts of radical love, and also of Dominic whose goodness persisted until the end and whose story moved me to tears.

Barbie dolls, The Kennedys in the White House, Librium for housewives, men treating their wives like children, ignoring the poverty of Viet Nam, American’s anti-communism idealization justifying our involvement in Viet Nam, vividly renders the era. A more innocent time, in terms of ignorance and acceptance of the status quo. Patricia sees the burns on children, unaware they are napalm burns. Her husband believes that Buddhist protesters self-immolating were Communist infiltrators.

Charlene is a memorable character, angry and rebellious, beautiful and sophisticated, a woman Patricia is warned about. Her plans for doing good are not always well thought out and not always successful. But she insists on acting, on doing something, anything, for the great sin is to ignore the pain of the world.

In a year when I have read so many stunningly good books, this one rates at the top of my list of favorites. For its story telling and characters and for its insight and message and emotional and intellectual impact.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

Marie reflects on her life in this one-person narrative. She is at home with her parents and brother Gabe to begin with. Gabe goes to seminary to be a priest. Her father dies quite young. Her mother, Marie, and Gabe continue living in the same apartment in Brooklyn, all working. She wonders if she will ever marry. She is shown with her friends. She works as a greeter in Fagin's Mortuary for 10 years before she marries Tom and has children. She almost dies from the birth of her first child, Tommy, Throughout all of this she has vision problems and wears coke-bottle glasses. After her brother has a break-down and spends time in a sanatorium, he comes to possible live with her, Tom and their 4 children who are almost grown.

Maria, the main character in Someone really is just an ordinary woman. We first see her as a wee child and while the there is a forward progress in her life line. Alice McDermott occasionally moves ahead into the future and back into the past. It's a very effective tool because all tend to look back and reflect on the past while at the same we wonder what the future will jolt for us. A wonder novel !

Time is handled in a "This Is Us" fashion: time goes backwards and forwards in At Weddings and Wakes. Time moves through memory and observation and seems incrementally slow. This is the story of what it means to be Irish-American in New York, told from the point of view of Lucy Dailey's school-aged children. Again, I was reminded of "This Is Us." The viewpoints are poignant and sad, tender and true to life. This Is Life. Lucy dutifully brings her children from Long Island to see her sisters and stepmother in Brooklyn. The three generations of family all have a rich bittersweet history to tell. Aunt Veronica needs alcohol to numb her grief. Aunt Agnes is nothing but sharp-tongued and career driven. But, the sweetness and light is found with Aunt May, a former nun in the midst of a romance with mailman.
McDermott is a master at displaying human emotions and behaviors in a way that you swear the characters are in your life; just ghosts who have just passed into another room while you weren't looking.
As an aside, can I just say how much I love the slug scene that appears in the beginning of the book and then returns at the end?½

Set in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, a young man commits suicide (not a spoiler – it is in the book’s description and first paragraphs), leaving his wife and unborn child without means. A nun happens to arrive on the scene, and helps the woman, providing her a job in the convent. When the child, called Sally, is born, she is raised with assistance from the sisters. The storyline follows several of the sisters, as they help the poor, sick, and elderly. The storyline also follows Sally’s struggles to decide whether or not to join the convent. Sally tries to help her mother, making a drastic decision that will change many lives. There are a few chapters that contain descendants of the main characters, providing a glimpse of what is to come. This is a quiet and sad story about life, morality, mortality, and the impact of decisions. It is not flashy or for anyone looking for action. It portrays the domino effect of an individual’s decisions that ripple down through the generations. I particularly enjoyed the writing style. I had never read anything by Alice McDermott before and look forward to reading more of her back catalogue.