Alice McDermott’s tale of American Catholics in Vietnam

Absolution, the latest in Alice McDermott’s uninterrupted series of delightfully smart and entertaining novels, poses a question that seems out of keeping with our current national preoccupations: What kind of woman followed her husband to Vietnam in 1963 to support President Kennedy’s alliance with South Vietnam and President Ngo Dinh Diem? 

McDermott’s answer: a Catholic woman. Or rather, a Catholic woman trained to honor and obey the institutional patriarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the ethical patriarchy of midcentury American marriages.

McDermott is well aware that French colonialism planted Catholicism in South Asian soil, that in the mid-1950s hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics fled Ho Chi Minh’s northern territories in favor of Catholic Saigon, that Kennedy and Diem founded their democratic hopes in Catholic notions of freedom and dignity, that throughout the Vietnam War the South Vietnamese officers were almost exclusively Catholics, and that early American political and military advisers to Vietnam were so thoroughly Catholic that they joked that the C in CIA stood for “Catholic.”