McDermott's latest novel, which centers on two American women who meet in Saigon in 1963, explores themes of religion, humility and insistent charitable intervention.
Humility is the one virtue you wouldn't expect Alice McDermott's characters would need to learn. Her characters are almost always Irish American, Catholic, working-class; they are often dependably meek and self-deprecating. But, in McDermott's new novel,also teaches me a lesson in critical humility.
Charlene was a strawberry blonde dynamo; a corporate wife who conscripted lesser females, like Tricia, into her volunteer army of do-gooders. Reflecting on Charlene's charisma, Tricia says,"I knew her type. I'd met enough girls like her at school. They all had that ability ... to enlist the help of strangers without ever seeming helpless themselves.
Without once lapsing into heavy-handedness, McDermott suggests parallels between the insistent charitable interventions of Charlene and her crew and the growing American military intervention in Vietnam. Recollecting the mood of"her" Saigon in 1963, Tricia recalls that:"the cocoon in which American dependents dwelled was still polished to a high shine by our sense of ourselves and our great, good nation.
You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent , ready to go home." McDermott possesses the rare ability to evoke and enter bygone worlds — pre-Vatican II Catholicism, pre-feminist-movement marriages — without condescending to them. She understands that the powerhouses can dominate the helpmeets. She also understands that playing God is the role of a lifetime — and every human actor should turn it down.
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