**A riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War,
from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
**
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The
wives.
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 as they do 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 one of our most observant, most affecting
writers--about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the
quest for absolution in a broken world.
