McDermott is rightly celebrated for her granular, nuanced portraits of mid-20th-century life, with a particular focus on Irish Americans. Her fans may be startled, then, to find themselves plunged into 1963 Saigon at the start of her enveloping new novel, Absolution, whose lofty title belies its sensory, gritty humanity ... Leaves the reader in its provocative shadow.
Crystalline, searching ... McDermott spins gold from sensuous details ... She probes the intricacies of parenting, its tender pleasures and primal instincts ... Beautifully conceived and executed.
It's futile to predict where a great writer's boundless imagination will take us and, as Absolution affirms, McDermott is a great writer ... Deft ... What draws out McDermott's most incisive, compassionate writing is the expat world of 'the wives' ... McDermott possesses the rare ability to evoke and enter bygone worlds...without condescending to them.
Powerful ... At once an exciting departure and a fitting development ... The novel’s setting, in a country soon to become a battleground for conflicting ideologies – a war driven in no small part by economics and a lust for oil – provides an excellent canvas for an examination of moral equivocation that has marked much of McDermott’s work ... Few writers have written about moral qualms with such sensitivity.
McDermott explores such vagaries with grace and consideration. Patricia’s thoughts always return, with great sensitivity, to the problem of goodness, which can appear inextricable from self-interest or mere docility ... These engaging reflections are mixed with, and to some extent diluted by, a ubiquitous note of apology. Patricia knows—as does the reader—that history has judged her very presence in Saigon to be ethically wrong, so she is anxious about even attempting to evoke sympathy for her life there ... This practice of begging the reader’s indulgence rather than simply telling a story is common in fiction today, but it is even more noticeable in writing as delicate and lovely as Ms. McDermott’s.
A fresh perspective on a regrettable period of American history – the Vietnam War – through a wonderfully immersive story that deserves a wide readership ... The irony of American women seeking to improve the horrific conditions of Vietnam’s orphaned, injured children while the work of their bureaucrat husbands contributes to ever more death and destruction gives some indication of the complexity of the novel ... The characterisation of Charlene is similarly intricate ... McDermott turns this same lacerating intelligence on issues of class, money, race, marriage, infertility and above all, the questionable politics that led to the Vietnam War. This is history as seen from the perspective of the wives, which is to say, the story of what really happened.
Evocative and masterly ... An epistolary novel that wears its formal and thematic ambitions deceptively lightly through McDermott’s vivid harnessing of period detail and pithy observations ... A masterclass in point of view and thorny characterisation. McDermott captures the convolutions of social dynamics and the mutability of memory with brilliant aplomb and attention to detail.
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.
With an engrossing plot, richly complex characters, and keen observations of social gestures, this compelling novel explores important themes such as colonialism, friendship, religion ... While there are too many characters to keep track of, the main and secondary figures are all drawn with admirable complexity and detail.
An exquisitely conceived and executed novel that explores her signature topic, moral obligation, against the backdrop of the fraught time preceding the Vietnam War. It would be a shame to reveal the structure of the novel (don’t even read the jacket description!), but it opens with a scene packed like a perfect suitcase with every important theme ... This transporting, piercing, profound novel is McDermott’s masterpiece.
