Absolution

August 15, 2023
The complicated, unseen lives of American corporate wives in Saigon, 1963. For more than 40 years, McDermott's deep understanding of human nature and wizardry in creating characters has been the seedbed of one bestselling, award-winning novel after another. Now she has outdone herself with an exquisitely conceived and executed novel that explores her signature topic, moral obligation, against the backdrop of the fraught time preceding the Vietnam War. It would be a shame to reveal the structure of the novel (don't even read the jacket description!), but it opens with a scene packed like a perfect suitcase with every important theme, character, and concern. The narrator, Patricia, begins in an epistolary vein, describing the languorous morning of a woman whose primary role is "helpmeet" to her husband, a lawyer for the Navy: doing her nails, writing letters, bathing, finally putting on her panty girdle and dressing for lunch. These observations are addressed to a "you," whom we then meet at the party (it's like one of those brilliant rolling long shots in a movie): "She was about seven or eight, in her Sunday best like the rest of us...She held a Barbie doll in the crook of her arm, like a scepter." This is Rainey; she has a baby brother whom Patricia accepts happily from their busy, bossy mother, Charlene (Patricia dearly hopes to be a mother herself soon) but who immediately vomits all over her. While the house girl, Lily, helps her clean her dress, Rainey shows her the gorgeous clothes Lily's made for Barbie. Lily, a talented seamstress, whips out another outfit then and there, a "perfect little �o d�i: the slim white pants, the long overdress." As soon as she sees "Saigon Barbie," Charlene is inspired to a charitable fundraising scheme, which she pretends Patricia came up with (poor Patricia, feeling crankier and more ill-used by the second), brusquely relieving Rainey of her doll to begin production without delay. "The tears that stood in your eyes, illuminating, or so it seemed, the blue of your irises, withdrew themselves--there was no other word for it. Not a one ever fell." After you finish the book, you'll want to reread this chapter. How the heck did she do it? All the complications of power, control, and self-control; who does and doesn't get what they want; the crimes committed in service of "helping" people--what a brilliant way to tell a story about Vietnam. This transporting, piercing, profound novel is McDermott's masterpiece.

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August 28, 2023
McDermott (The Ninth Hour) unfurls an evocative character study of American women in 1963 Saigon. Newlywed Tricia, a young woman of blue-collar stock whose lawyer husband works for Naval Intelligence, is out of her element among the socialites of her new milieu. She’s mentored by the sophisticated Charlene, an oil magnate’s wife who hosts martini lunches and devises altruistic if misguided aid schemes (one fundraiser involves selling Barbie dolls dressed in traditional Vietnamese garb). Tricia grows fond of Rainey, Charlene’s little girl, and much of the book unfolds in present day letters and conversations between Tricia and Rainey, the younger woman having contacted Tricia after meeting an American Vietnam War veteran who knew her and Charlene. McDermott finds her groove when she has Tricia reexamining her time in Saigon, where the women around her slipped into prescribed roles without questioning their submissiveness. A poignant conclusion shows how Charlene supported Tricia back in the ’60s after Tricia’s miscarriage (“I did not want to be the sort of woman who had a miscarriage. Didn’t want to be a part of that simpering sorority, a keeper of that shameful secret,” she narrates). In McDermott’s powerful story, the quest for absolution falls just beyond her characters’ grasp. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Company.

September 15, 2023
The opening cocktail party in McDermott's sublime ninth novel, following The Ninth Hour (2017), is a marvel of emotional, sensual, and social acuity as a young, shy, recently married woman from Yonkers tries to find her footing in the brash, moneyed American expat circle in early 1960s Saigon. Blueblood Charlene quickly enlists Tricia in a fundraising scheme to help Vietnamese orphans and leprosy patients sequestered at a coastal retreat. She has asked Lily, a skilled Vietnamese seamstress, to make a tiny �o d�i, the traditional Vietnamese dress, for "Saigon Barbie," which Charlene is convinced will be a hit within their privileged circle. Determined, angry, and reckless Charlene instigates risky situations; tenderhearted Tricia longs for motherhood. Addressed years later to Rainey, Charlene's daughter, Tricia's meticulously detailed, droll, deeply affecting reminiscences have a mordant refrain, "You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives." In contrast, Rainey shares a story of radiant parental devotion. McDermott is a resplendent writer of lacerating insights, gorgeous lyricism, and subtle yet exacting moral reckoning, here illuminating shades of good and evil within a bubble of Western privilege and prejudice in a country on the brink of war, concentrating the inane and cruel misogyny women faced in Barbie, that freshly energized icon of female paradox and power.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 3, 2023

Returning to fiction after What About the Baby?, McDermott focuses on characterization. Young newlywed Patricia and little Rainey meet in Saigon in 1963 at a garden party hosted by Rainey's mother, Charlene. It is Patricia's introduction to the world of American high-society wives. With the assistance of some U.S. military personnel, Charlene draws Patricia into her black-market activities involving a Vietnamese children's hospital and a leprosarium. Charlene's imperious treatment of the Vietnamese women in her employ further strains the women's relationship. Sixty years later, Rainey tracks down Patricia to ask her for the full story of Charlene's secretive influence over whomever she met. Charlene was the catalyst both for Patricia's metamorphosis from a naive dewy-eyed "helpmeet" to tougher pragmatic independent woman and for Rainey's transition from a troubled adolescent to a happily married wife and mother. VERDICT National Book Award winner McDermott frames this exquisite novel (a recent Barnes & Noble book club pick) against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Social class, awakening feminist consciousness, the bladed side of "good works," and the power of one seemingly small event that changes lives forever are perfectly revealed in this correspondence between two women, connected over six decades by their shared experience.--Beth E. Andersen

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