BookBrowse Review
BookBrowse
McDermott seems interested in writing about degrees of marginality, of guilt, and of goodness. The women endure their husbands' sexist jokes and the patronizing attitudes of male doctors they often work alongside in their mission to provide relief to the ill; yet they themselves tend to otherize the Vietnamese people, despite their best intentions. And of course there's the bigger picture: the reason the Americans are "cocooned" in the country in the first place is an unstable mixture of quixotic democratic fervor and pure greed. Absolution takes a thought-provoking fresh perspective on a much-fictionalized chapter of history, which is best represented by the fact that it elides John F. Kennedy's assassination and focuses instead on when the First Lady gave birth to a stillborn child and was the last person to find out about it after the media quickly broke the story. "You have to understand what it was like in those days," Tricia writes, "for us, the wives."..continued
Full Review 
(704 words)
(Reviewed by Jacob Lenz-Avila).
Media Reviews
Oprah Daily
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.
Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
For four decades now, McDermott has written one exquisite novel after another, but her latest, a poignant tale of women and girls living on the periphery of the Vietnam War, may just be her masterpiece ... In this richly imagined novel, packed with unforgettable characters, McDermott soars in a profound quest of moral inquiry.
Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
[McDermott] has taken the worn tapestry of the war novel and turned it inside out, exposing the original colors and throwing the battles and bivouacs into stark relief.
Hamilton Cain, The Washington Post
Crystalline, searching ... McDermott spins gold from sensuous details ... Beautifully conceived and executed, Absolution stares down the assumptions and loyalties that cage us all.
Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
Powerful ... Sharp-eyed ... [Absolution] addresses the question of forgiveness on both a personal and political level. Few writers have written about moral qualms with such sensitivity.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
A work of consistently beautiful prose ... McDermott, who can easily build dramatic urgency out of even the most mundane tasks, evokes an eerie sense of instability and future implosion ... The question of how to help others—and how much it costs to do so ... is ever-present for Charlene and Patricia, who maintain, in the brief time when their lives overlap, a bizarre, conflicted, co-dependent friendship that is utterly fascinating.
Jennifer Egan, The New York Times
Enveloping ... Retrospect amplifies McDermott's narrative approach; her work lives in its shimmering details ... The debacle of America's involvement in Vietnam might easily have overdetermined McDermott's story, and it is a measure of her skill that Absolution maintains an oblique relationship to the war ... What difference might it have made, for everyone, if those wives had been given a choice in the decision-making? Without posing this question directly, Absolution leaves the reader in its provocative shadow.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR
It's futile to predict where a great writer's boundless imagination will take us and, as Absolution affirms, McDermott is a great writer ... McDermott possesses the rare ability to evoke and enter bygone worlds—pre-Vatican II Catholicism, pre-feminist-movement marriages—without condescending to them. She understands that the powerhouses can dominate the helpmeets. She also understands that playing God is the role of a lifetime—and every human actor should turn it down.
Booklist (starred review)
Sublime ... McDermott is a resplendent writer of lacerating insights, gorgeous lyricism, and subtle yet exacting moral reckoning, here illuminating shades of good and evil within a bubble of Western privilege and prejudice in a country on the brink of war, concentrating the inane and cruel misogyny women faced in Barbie, that freshly energized icon of female paradox and power.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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.
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
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.
Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
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.
Reader Reviews
Cathryn Conroy
Brilliant! A Story of Vietnam You've Never Heard Before…A Story of the Women, the Wives
In a word: brilliant!This is a book about Vietnam in the very early days of the war, a story you've never heard before. This is a book about the women, the wives of the important men—diplomats, engineers, intelligence officers, attorneys, and ... Read More
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