Vietnam Navy wives’ privilege pondered

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This article was published 16/12/2023 (1029 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thoughtful but unfulfilling, American author Alice McDermot sets her ninth novel during the Vietnam War, viewing the tragedy from the view of a woman who joins her husband on assignment in Saigon.

While McDermott offers a new perspective, it’s ultimately a bit flat.

Unlike many well-known war novels such as Graham Greene’s classic 1955 novel The Quiet American or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, McDermott keeps politics, the horrors of the front lines and the trauma suffered by survivors in the background.

And compared to Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer, which examines the Vietnam War from a multitude of angles, Absolution is simply another take of a person of privilege sort of realizing her own privilege.

The novel opens with elderly widow Tricia telling her story to Rainey, the daughter of Charlene, Tricia’s long-ago friend in Saigon. “You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives,” Tricia tells Rainey.

Tricia tells how in 1963, she and her social-climbing husband Peter travelled to Saigon, where he had accepted a job with the U.S. Navy.

Determined to be a “helpmeet” to her husband, start a family and “do good” for the people of Vietnam, shy Tricia forces herself to attend cocktail parties and make friends with the other wives who have joined their corporate and military husbands overseas.

“As much as I resented these perfumed, politely chattering women, I wanted to be one of them. If only because I believed that when I held out my hand and made small talk and accepted their invitations… I was somehow advancing my husband’s illustrious career,” Tricia recounts.

Tricia’s first new friend is Charlene, mother to Rainey and reigning queen bee of the white women’s social circle.

Unable to resist Charlene’s forceful pull, Tricia finds her days filled with trips of mercy to children’s hospitals, leper colonies and fundraisers.

Sixty years later, Rainey contacts Tricia after an encounter with an acquaintance of Charlene’s and Tricia’s from Saigon.

Through their correspondence, the women wryly examine Charlene and Tricia’s real motivation to “do good” in Vietnam.

In some ways, naïve, passive Tricia stands in as a symbol for Vietnam — a woman pushed around and used by Charlene for her own unrevealed machinations.

In other ways, the novel reads simply like a study of middle- and upper-middle class women’s lives in the 1960s that just happens to be set in Vietnam.

Tricia is so passive and uninterested in the politics of Vietnam and so sheltered from most war experiences that it’s easy to forget what brought her there in the first place.

At 320-plus pages, the book isn’t overly long, but much of the length comes from McDermott’s flowery prose, filled with unnecessary descriptions of, for example, Tricia dressing for cocktail parties or recalling her courtship with Pete.

McDermott does redeem herself in her believable, subtle dialogue.

In one example, an exchange between Tricia and Charlene about educating Vietnamese girls and young women shows the condescension and racism motivating American women: “Trying to keep them out of the whorehouses,” Charlene tells Tricia. “Or get them out. Get them real jobs with Americans or Europeans, if we can.”

McDermott’s attempt at illuminating a chapter of history in a new light is interesting but ultimately unsuccessful.

Kathryne Cardwell is a Winnipeg writer.