You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
For thirty years, Alice McDermott has masterfully used the quotidian – everyday living, mundane existence, limited personal power, etc. – to project to a larger more complex story. From the microcosm to the universal, she narrows her lens and then, moment by moment, through the actions of her characters and her observations, we see what is otherwise ignored.
In one of her first novels, AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES, [1992] a favorite of mine, she zeroed in on aging repressed sisters and the impact of their limited lives. In the novel, SOMEONE [2013] she wove a first person account of an ordinary woman and, at first, and this is typical of a McDermott, a reader might wonder why we care, and then the story captivates through detail and matters of the heart, as well as extraordinary prose. What I refer to as slow page-turners. And, in her award-winning CHARMING BILLY [1997] perhaps her best work, until now, she deploys a secondary character to tell the tale of a compelling ne’er-do-well, and the impact of that sort of man as an early prototype of masculinity.
McDermott is a traditional storyteller – not always linear but powerful narrative. She requires no gimmicks or pyrotechnics to introduce a dynamic environment of emotion and experience. She does it the old fashioned way, with well-defined, relatable characters, discreet settings, and brilliant observations about human nature. Mostly she writes about lost innocence and dreams deferred, or denied, with an eye always to the struggles of contemporary women.
Most of her novels, by the way, stay close to her New York City/Brooklyn home, and Irish roots, providing the verisimilitude and urban charm you might expect, but not all, and not the new one: ABSOLUTION.
I recall your hubris on that first morning in Saigon, our confidence, our Western centrism enhanced, inflated, beyond all forgiveness, by our far more conceited, bone-deep New-Yorker-from-Yonkers self-regard.
In a nutshell: Rush the work and the chores, avoid social media and skip the streaming, to settle in with her terrific cast of characters and discover the insight she will slowly reveal.
At that moment, my sense of my own stupidity – what had I risked for this little adventure? – was only the small chrysalis of the rising, thumping thing it would become later that afternoon and in the days that followed. I was very naive.
Set in the later days of the Vietnam War, McDermott focuses her zoom lens on a few of the wives of the military establishment there, who, in their sheer invisibility, and unimportance, seek meaning by inserting themselves into the lives of some of the locals. This is executed in unusual ways [no further detail here to avoid spoilers.] As one might expect [although there is little in this novel that is predictable] they find themselves mired in their ignorance. Like missionaries, they contrive to assimilate American know-how, and benevolence, to a people they simply cannot comprehend.
I wondered: in a life so prescribed, so determined, what happened to the pleasure of expectation?
The war is background, the wives, and the Vietnamese in their midst, foreground. And, once again, McDermott uses an distinctive narrative viewpoint: told by the most marginalized of the wives as a form of communication to the daughter of the trouble maker. In this way, the novel has much to do with the mother-child bond.
I saw you – your face still trapped in your mother’s hand – straighten your narrow shoulders, press your lips together, smooth the skirt of your golden Sunday dress. The tears that stood in your eyes, illuminating, so it seemed, the blue of your irises, withdrew themselves – there was no other word for it. Not a one ever fell.
Ignorance may be bliss on the part of the ignorant, especially the willfully ignorant, but can be ruthless to the victim. McDermott uses the quotidian here to exemplify the American power play in Vietnam. A stunning achievement and, most importantly, a gorgeous work of fiction.
If you haven’t yet read this great writer, I urge you to go back to her backlist, and also to her recent book on writing: WHAT ABOUT THE BABY? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction [2021].
You absolutely do not have to be a writer – you do have to be an active reader – to appreciate her reflections on the nature of storytelling and enjoy the words of many other terrific writers.
ABSOLUTION is available in hardcover, for your favorite e-reader, and on Audible.