In her recent novel, Absolution, Alice McDermott considers the lives — and historical trajectories — of the American women who traveled with their husbands to Vietnam in 1963 as the US laid the groundwork for what would become a devastating war. The book is vintage McDermott — a moral tale that withholds moral judgement, a consideration of historical reality streaked with the spiritual unknown. Ahead of her upcoming reading and conversation with fellow bestselling novelist Amor Towles — in-person tickets are sold out, but you can still join us online — Alice McDermott talked to us about her memories of growing up during the Vietnam War, fiction’s capacity to ask serious questions about reality, the makings of a good story, and more.
Absolution begins in Saigon in 1963, at the outset of the war in Vietnam. What interested you about this particular moment in history?
I’m not the first to notice that 1963 was a pivotal and historically rich year. JFK’s assassination, Medgar Evers’ assassination, the March on Washington — all of that was happening in the US. Pope John XXI, who had tried to open the Catholic Church, died that year. Probably most significantly for my characters, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, marking the first real stirring of the next big women’s movement. And it was the last moment of naivete and innocence in the American public about what was taking shape in Vietnam. I came of age with the Vietnam War. I wasn’t touched by it personally, but older boys in my neighborhood went off and came back changed. My brothers sweated through the draft lottery. When I was in college, professors would threaten, If you don’t pass my class, don’t come to me telling saying you’re going to be shipped you off to Vietnam. That time, that place, that particular year is so rich — and I’m always interested in the voices we haven’t heard from yet in an age that we’ve heard a lot about.
The role that female friendship plays in world-historical events is central to Absolution. What complexities unfold in a relationship between women that stories focusing solely on the lives of men might miss?
Oh, many [laughs]. It’s complicated, but especially in a community such as the one in Absolution — an American ex-pat community in Saigon where men were laying the groundwork for what would become a war — the relationship between women was important. There were men who didn’t talk to their wives about what they were doing there in Southeast Asia. Shoe salesmen in Peoria didn’t tell their wives how much money they made or how they paid the bills — they would say, Don’t worry your pretty little head. Women had an immediate sense of being in it together as they tried to understand the world they lived in. I have lived inside the Beltway for over 30 years, and over the course of my time here I’ve run into many women a bit older than me who were State Department spouses, who lived in far-off places in their formative years. The thing that has always struck me about these women is that they never tell you what their experience was unless you ask. They always defer, saying, My husband was doing the interesting work, I was just taking care of the children or doing a little bit of charity work. They insist that they have no story from that time. The contrarian in me — or perhaps the feminist in me — says, Oh no, there’s a story there, much more of a story than in the lives of your husbands, who were just out there screwing up the world.
For decades you’ve honed a style of realism in your novels that asks serious moral questions without ever being didactic. How can fiction address the urgent and very real moral questions of our moment?
More and more I’m thinking only fiction can do that. We’re so suspicious of one another. This suspicion has invaded so much of our discourse. We are so sure of what we know. I think fiction is the place where a writer can say to a reader: consider this. It isn’t an argument, or an attempt to convince someone that your point of view is correct and enlightened. Instead, it presents a situation, human beings in a situation, and lets us — reader and writer — take it into consideration together. The fiction writer can go beyond the surfaces to explore a character’s experience in the world. Perhaps this is the only way to get us back on course to considering our lives on Earth with an open mind.
You’ll be talking about Absolution at 92NY with Amor Towles, a friend of yours. What do you love most about his writing?
He has honed the perfect skill — keeping the reader with the story. He does it so well. When we’re talking about spiritual matters and metaphor — all the wonderful things fiction can do — we can forget that none of these ideas matter much if the reader stops reading. Amor’s novels, A Gentleman in Moscow and Lincoln Highway, are irresistible. You have to turn the page. They contain some of the most essential elements of storytelling and character development. His success is the best indication of that. It sounds basic, but it’s essential.
What do you hope those who attend this conversation take away with them?
This business of being alive and trying to figure out how to get along with one another is complicated. Our impulse to shake our fingers at one another is misguided. Absolution asks the reader to consider a set of characters in a time and place who didn’t have the benefit of historical hindsight that we do now. Try to have empathy for those who are groping in the dark and have no idea what the future will bring.
Alice McDermott discusses Absolution with Amor Towles on Monday, December 16. Online tickets are still available.