I don’t know why, but the Vietnam War has always interested me. I didn’t know anyone personally who had served in Vietnam, as it was ending about the time I became an adult. But there’s always been something intriguing about it. I don’t know if it has to do with the location and that it was in a tropical area or what. Whatever it was, I’ve read a lot of books about Vietnam and even have a large tome containing photos taken throughout the war. So when I read that this book was about wives of husbands stationed in Saigon, I knew it was something I wanted to read.

I read this book in three days. I have to say I was somewhat mesmerized by it and its main character, Charlene. I already had a list of books I wanted to read to decide which would be my book club selection, but when I read the synopsis of this book, I knew I had to add it to the list. I’ve already eliminated some of the books on my original list. This book is definitely a contender, but I don’t know if it can beat out the forerunner, “The Last House on the Street”.

Amazon writes:

American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to Navy Intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.