We haven't heard much about American women in the Vietnam War. 'Absolution' fixes that

Alice McDermott's peerless meditations on domesticity enliven her latest work, "Absolution," as narrator Patricia Kelly juxtaposes the "glorious first months" of her marriage with its eventual complications.

Patricia and husband Peter move from Virginia to Saigon in 1963 so Peter can act as an adviser there. Patricia repeatedly describes her identity, at the time, as her husband's "helpmeet." "Peter's story," she says, "was my own." But McDermott makes it clear from the outset that this is the story of the women.

The storytelling emerges in letters between the characters. The epistolary form allows McDermott to showcase the distinctive voices of her characters. Patricia, the primary narrator, is gently ruminative, attentive to the fine details of her early 20s: her first quiche; her first Manhattan; her friendship with Charlene, a charismatic blend of bully and benefactor. Patricia's correspondent, Rainey, is Charlene's daughter. A generation younger, Rainey has a less gauzy view; there is more matter-of-factness, less romance, in her letters.

Rainey, who initiates the exchanges, wants to learn more about her neighbor, Dominic, who happens to have been an acquaintance of her mother's in Vietnam. By placing Dominic at the ostensible center, McDermott creates a structure that continually surprises the reader. There are, indeed, thrilling stories that feature Dominic — among them the tale of a secretive visit to a leper colony that ends with a broken-down car in a rainstorm — but Rainey's and Patricia's recollections, their unanswered questions and pleas, mostly have to do with Charlene.

McDermott, who can easily build dramatic urgency out of even the most mundane tasks, evokes an eerie sense of instability and future implosion as soon as Charlene and Patricia meet. The former is formidable, the latter shy. Both are intelligent. In Saigon, the women live in what Patricia describes as a "cocoon," suggesting that change — possibly volatile — is imminent. The slow, painful description of Patricia's first miscarriage manages to stand out in a work of consistently beautiful prose.

In the immediate wake of the miscarriage, Charlene is a source of comfort to Patricia; later, her effort to solve problems for Patricia is startlingly unethical. This happens again and again with Charlene, whose obsessive interest in charity is matched only by compulsive entrepreneurship that relies, in part, on theft.

The question of how to help others — and how much it costs to do so — is at the foundation of this unsentimental novel. The question is ever-present for Charlene and Patricia, who maintain, in the brief time when their lives overlap, a bizarre, conflicted, co-dependent friendship that is utterly fascinating.

Absolution

By: Alice McDermott.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 324 pages, $28.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in the Washington Post and the Harvard Review. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, her next Star Tribune review is of James Jennings' "Wings of Red."