“Absolution,” by Alice McDermott, translated from English (United States) by Cécile Arnaud, Quai Voltaire, 352 p., €24, digital €17.
We imagine them as Betty Draper, the embodiment of the perfect housewife. sixtiesstaged in the series Mad Men (2007-2015). They are American and live in Saigon, then capital of South Vietnam, where their husbands were sent by the Washington administration. The plot ofAbsolutionthe ninth novel by American writer Alice McDermott, begins in 1963. Tricia discovers the cozy world of expatriates, made of superficiality and boredom. There, despite the Vietnam War intensifying not far away, the garden parties given by some and others constitute the essential part of a corseted social life. The moment the young woman sets foot in one of these homes, the abysses of frivolous idleness threaten to swallow her up. Until she meets Charlene.
This one is everything she’s not: bold, charismatic, rascal. “Charlene schemed, schemed, and black marketed; she bullied people, drove like a maniac, barged in more than she entered, took pills, collected money. She was a real live wire.”describes Tricia. Very quickly, the cheeky girl takes her on one of her charity projects: selling Barbie clothes made by a local craftsman to American women, for the benefit of those in need.
The two friends visit hospitals, hand out trinkets to children tortured by unbearable burns. Those inflicted by the napalm poured on the country by the United States. Tricia suspects it, but she refuses to see it. Catholic, a teacher in a Harlem kindergarten before leaving for Vietnam, she is convinced that she is on the side of the good guys. At this point in the story, the reader still gives her the benefit of the doubt. Her commitment becomes more equivocal when Charlene invites her to place Vietnamese newborns for adoption in the United States, in exchange for a generous sum paid to their mothers. Do the latter really have a choice? Can a child be guaranteed a better future by tearing him away from his family, however poor they may be? Where is the line between good and evil?
Civilized Torments
The wives don’t know. They’re in the gray area, but Alice McDermott never condemns them. She never makes a moral judgment on their actions. Instead, she focuses on dissecting their ambivalences, and this dive into the polite torments of the two accomplices is fascinating. Charlene and Tricia seek meaning in the midst of chaos, courageous, pathetic, fighting in their own way against the injunctions specific to their class. “You have no idea what it was like for us. The women, I mean. The wives.”Tricia justifies, from the first pages. “My true calling, at that time, my aspiration, was to be a partner to my husband.”she adds, imagining herself as the latter’s equal.
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