In July I read two books by Alice McDermott and now with this audiobook perhaps this little Alice McDermott festival will end for a time. After all, this is the sixth of her books I’ve read. I think this is my favorite, though I sure did love Someone. I knew I needed to read this one after learning that three people I know had read it.
This story comes in the form of letters, the main one written by Patricia to the mature daughter of Charlene, a woman she had known for a short time in Vietnam in the early 1960s just as the Americans were sending more troops. For me the triumph of this book is the revealing of that woman, Charlene, or I should say the effort to describe and understand the elusive Charlene.
Patricia was a young newlywed when she arrived in Saigon in 1963 with her husband, a new CIA operative; Charlene demonstrated that she was the smart one in charge of her cabal who quickly found Patricia useful for her purposes and at the same time was able to care for Patricia when that was needed. Charlene both raised money for hospitalized Vietnamese children and changed money for her friends using the black market and taking a cut for herself. She was both supremely self-assured and bossy and had severe night terrors. Patricia describes precisely how it was that Charlene was able to establish her dominance in various situations. Most damningly, she describes how certain Charlene was that her vision of goodness was correct and was able to ignore any collateral damage.
Reading about that era brought up many memories. Though I was in high school in 1963, I did have tangential experience relating to Vietnam. And while it was 1967 before I married and there were significant societal changes in that period, I was not surprised by Patricia’s description of her lack of agency as a young wife. My brother-in-law thought he could tell my sister how to vote.
Not surprisingly McDermott focused on the Catholicism of the characters. They were proud to have a Catholic president and related to the president of South Vietnam as he was Catholic, though tinged with Buddhism. Patricia and her husband were invited to attend an Episcopal service with Charlene and her family; Charlene was thoughtful enough to mention that it was the 11:00 service, so they would be able to go to mass earlier. Just attending a protestant service was a departure for them.
McDermott used a striking term that surely is related to her Catholicism. In describing the color of the steering wheel of her college friend’s ancient car, she said it was “dirty bone white, as I recall it, like something out of a reliquary.” Interesting connection.
The other letter in the book was written by Charlene’s daughter Rainey to Patricia describing her life as the daughter of that dynamo Charlene. She also wrote about Dom, a neighbor she discovered had been in her mother’s orbit in Vietnam. Patricia’s voice was the much more interesting of the two.
A book that focuses on the character’s time in Vietnam and then her life forty years later reminded me that I had read another book with a similar premise. Spies in Canaan by David Park tells about a young CIA operative in Vietnam at the end of the war. Both books mention The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
It’s great to come under the spell of such a great writer.
Alice McDermott, Absolution, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023, 336 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.