Absolution (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

by Alice McDermott

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Alice McDermott's sublime novel cuts across decades and continents to tell an unforgettable story of a changing world.

This Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition has a unique cover and includes an afterword exclusively for Barnes & Noble customers.

A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.

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 Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers—about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374614904
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Edition description:	Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	3,555
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Alice McDermott is the author of several novels, including The Ninth Hour, Someone, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night—all published by FSG. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. For more than two decades she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. McDermott lives with her family outside Washington, DC.

Hometown:

Bethesda, Maryland

Date of Birth:

June 27, 1953

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

B.A., State University of New York-Oswego, 1975; M.A., University of New Hampshire, 1978

Editorial Reviews

08/28/2023

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Alice McDermott has always been one 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, author of The Dutch House

"With Absolution, Alice McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart. McDermott is a storyteller who aims for the stars. Absolution takes us there, by way of wartime Saigon, and with a powerful reminder that good intentions can have consequences that jerk us awake over a lifetime. What a splendid, compelling book this is." —Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

"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 . . . This transporting, piercing, profound novel is McDermott’s masterpiece." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Damning and dazzling, this is the story of a Vietnam we never got in history class—a story of innocence lost, the bounds of womanhood tested, and our nation held to account." —Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily

From the Publisher

★ 2023-07-26
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 áo dài: 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.

Kirkus Reviews