Festival Feature: McDermott – A Quest for Absolution
August 2, 2025
NOTE: A version of this story appears in our 2025 South Dakota Festival of Books guide, produced by South Dakota Magazine. Alice McDermott, winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Charming Billy, will be featured at the Festival of Books, Sept. 26-28 in Spearfish.
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, published in 1955, is widely regarded for its prescience regarding the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and the tragic outcomes that materialized more than a decade later. But to a keen novelist like Alice McDermott, an admirer of Greene’s work, the book is not without its shortcomings — particularly in its depiction of women.
“He had a great political sense about what might come of America’s hubris, interfering in countries we knew nothing about. But he didn’t know much about the women’s movement coming, because the women in the novel are not very interesting,” McDermott says. “I always thought there was another way to tell this story about America’s innocence abroad that hasn’t been told before.”
Women take center stage in McDermott’s new novel Absolution, winner of the 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Told through the lens of a correspondence written decades after the war, the novel is centered around Tricia and Charlene, whose husbands are among the wave of military advisors and private contractors sent to Vietnam in 1963 — a pivotal year in world history that brought the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the assassinations of presidents John F. Kennedy and Ngo Din Diem of South Vietnam. Tricia sees herself as her husband’s “helpmeet,” there in a strictly domestic role, while Charlene — foreshadowing the women’s movement to come — is fiercely independent, throwing herself into charitable works in an effort to assuage the suffering that surrounds them.
The characters are informed by the women McDermott has met in more than 30 years of living inside Washington, D.C.’s Beltway. These wives of diplomats and military officers never shared stories from their experiences abroad because they thought they weren’t important. “These women did have interesting stories, but they didn’t know they did because they were so self-deprecating,” she says. “Their husbands were doing all of this world building while they took care of the children. Knowing the historical moment, hearing personal stories, knowing what society was like for women at that time, I wondered how these women would live their lives.”
The later correspondence between Tricia and Charlene’s daughter, Rainey, — through which the novel’s narrative unfolds — gives each woman a chance to seek her own sort of absolution: Tricia for her time in Vietnam and Rainey for her strained relationship with Charlene. The narrative also offers lessons in hindsight and unintended consequences.
“We thought we were doing good, and many people did believe that this was for the good, and it wasn’t,” McDermott says of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. “So what do we do with that? How do we look back at a time where the people living through it did not have the benefit of hindsight? How do we judge the past because we do have that benefit, and we can point the finger? It’s a way of looking at history and not so much assigning blame but trying to understand. It’s not a get out of jail free card, but it’s that extra empathy and imagination that it takes to say, ‘I understand what you did was wrong, but I also understand why you did it.’”
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