Becky's Great Book Reviews Absolution by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott's Absolution is a viewpoint of 1963 Vietnam from the officer's wives amidst the elevating conflict between North and South Vietnam and the U.S.'s increasing involvement. Patricia, a newlywed who is temporarily living in Vietnam with her engineer husband, meets Charlene and her young daughter Rainey at a cocktail party in Saigon. Rainey will go on to seek out Patricia some sixty years later, of which their correspondence shapes the novel.

Charlene is the catalyst for the two women to do good while there. In the spirit of the Hebrew phrase "tikkun olam", which means "repair the world" Patricia and Charlene join a contingent of American corpsmen visiting rural orphanages and leper colonies, toting small gifts, toys, and clothes.

Nowadays they might be labeled a "white savior" but as Patricia tells Rainey decades later, "neither one of us had any furious ambition to do more than is reasonable about the chaos in the world. The awfulness". Working alongside the Catholic nuns who were, according to a doctor working in Vietnam, "on everybody's side", Charlene and Patricia witness horrors that would be sinful to ignore. They don't.

As Charlene is holding a child who dies in her arms, she becomes angry over the senselessness of the loss. While a well-meaning young corpsman tries to make Charlene feel better about it, saying "what are you going to do. These things happen", a doctor replies, "see if you have the balls to do this." The women of this novel may have appeared to be doing inconsequential good, as Rainey later puts it, but anyone with a heart can see that it was not.

McDermott's compelling piece of historical fiction offers a unique angle of the Vietnam war as well as a vivid snapshot in time. Absolution is one to pick up, and one not to be forgotten. I give Absolution four stars out of five.