AUDIOBOOK
About
A riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
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 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 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, 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 Charlene's altruistic machinations, and discovering as they do 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.
A virtuosic new novel from one of our most observant, most affecting writers-about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
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 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 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, 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 Charlene's altruistic machinations, and discovering as they do 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.
A virtuosic new novel from one of our most observant, most affecting writers-about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.
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Reviews
Rachel Kenney and Jesse Vilinsky each deliver spellbinding interpretations of Alice McDermott's superb new novel. Set primarily in 1960s Vietnam, the audiobook explores the lives of wives-- "helpmeets"--who accompanied their American husbands to a country on the brink of war. Through a series of letters written years later, we hear first from Patricia, a na�ve New Yorker swept up by masterful do-g
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