ABSOLUTION

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.