Opening Context
Set in 1963 Saigon and recalled decades later, Absolution follows American dependents—wives, mothers, and young newlyweds—who try to do good in a place they scarcely understand. Their garden parties, charity drives, and private griefs collide with a brutal political reality, exposing the limits of idealism and the costs of looking away. Through letters and memory, the story probes what aid, loyalty, and responsibility truly mean.
Main Characters
Patricia "Tricia" Kelly
Tricia is the novel’s reflective narrator, writing to an adult Rainey about her formative year as a newlywed in Saigon. Shy, devout, and eager to be a perfect “helpmeet,” she’s swept into the orbit of a more forceful friend whose schemes force her to confront her own timid idealism. As she endures miscarriage and moral confusion, she reevaluates the comforts of good intentions and the blind spots of American benevolence. Her ties to Charlene, her love for Peter, and her tender regard for Vietnamese women like Ly illuminate her struggle to do right. Across her letters, her narration becomes an act of Memory, Storytelling, and Perspective, a bid for understanding and a plea for absolution.
Charlene
Charlene is the charismatic, formidable center of the American wives’ world, a woman of wealth-born confidence who transforms charity into a personal crusade. Energetic, pragmatic, and often unscrupulous, she bends rules—shoplifting, bargaining on the black market—to fund “good works,” trusting that ends justify means. Her brisk maternal style and feral determination conceal night terrors and flashes of vulnerability, hinting at costs she won’t name. She mentors and manipulates Tricia, clashes with cynics, fascinates the American doctor, and outpaces a weary husband who calls her circle a “cabal.” Through her, the novel probes Morality, Good Deeds, and Absolution, challenging passive models of femininity and the comfort of tidy ethics.
Supporting Characters
Rainey
Rainey is Charlene’s well-mannered daughter whose childhood politeness introduces Tricia to Charlene and, years later, whose adult questions draw out Tricia’s long letter. As a seeker of truth about her mother and Dominic Carey, she frames the novel’s inquiry into memory and legacy. Her correspondence with Tricia becomes the bridge between past impression and present understanding.
Peter Kelly
Peter is Tricia’s devoted husband, an engineer-lawyer working with U.S. Navy intelligence whose faith and patriotism mirror early-1960s American certainties. He cherishes Tricia as a partner yet presumes a traditional marital script, one tested by Saigon’s upheavals and their private losses. His journey from idealism to disillusion—culminating in his resignation after the coup—embodies American Naivete and Imperialism.
The Unnamed American Doctor
The doctor is a retired Army physician turned lone missionary whose grim stories and abrasive candor puncture the wives’ sanitized charity. Physically imposing and morally ambiguous, he recognizes Charlene’s ferocity and unsettles Tricia with a charged, unwanted attraction. He stands for a raw engagement with suffering that refuses pieties and tidy narratives.
Lily (Ly)
Ly is a gifted Vietnamese seamstress whose exquisite craft—most memorably an ao dai for a Barbie doll—inspires Charlene’s first big fundraising idea. Gentle and loyal, she maintains a warm but unequal bond with Tricia and Rainey, while her devotion to a cousin at the leper colony ultimately determines her fate. Her quiet sacrifice reframes “opportunity” through the lens of duty and love.
Stella Carney
Stella is Tricia’s brilliant, politically fierce college friend who never appears in Saigon but lives in Tricia’s conscience. She challenges complacency and interrogates privilege, serving as a counterpoint to the dependents’ apolitical routines. In memory, she marks the threshold of a rising feminist and protest consciousness.
Dominic Carey
Dominic is a cheerful GI medic and conscientious objector whose open-hearted service at the children’s hospital embodies uncomplicated kindness. Remembered fondly by Tricia and Charlene, he later crosses paths with Rainey, prompting her outreach and setting the novel’s correspondence in motion. He offers a human-scale goodness that contrasts with Charlene’s calculated campaigns.
Minor Characters
- Kent: Charlene’s tall, handsome husband, wary of her relentless projects and dismissive of her “cabal,” a tension that exposes the limits of 1960s marital expectations.
- Minh-Linh: The Kellys’ efficient housekeeper, whose fierce intervention in the crisis over baby Suzie reveals moral clarity beyond Tricia’s naïveté.
- Dr. Wally Welty: A gentle pediatric resident who partners with Charlene’s efforts and accompanies the women to the leper colony, sharing a flirtatious, brainy rapport with her.
- Marilee: An officers’ club manager whose cynicism about charity—“the road to hell is paved with good intentions”—provokes one of Charlene’s fiercest defenses.
- Phan: Ly’s widowed, pregnant friend whose desperation fuels Charlene’s most shocking plan: arranging the sale of her unborn child to Americans.
- Suzie: A beautiful baby with a port-wine birthmark, presented to Tricia as a “gift,” whose fate forces a defining moral reckoning.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
At the heart of the novel is the uneasy pairing of Tricia and Charlene: a mentor-protégé bond that doubles as a moral tug-of-war. Tricia’s deference and longing to belong make her susceptible to Charlene’s audacity, while Charlene prizes Tricia’s saintly image as cover for ethically dubious fundraising. Their intimacy breeds rivalry—admiration shading into alarm—as each tests the other’s limits.
The American wives coalesce into informal factions around Charlene’s charisma, creating a social hierarchy of helpers, skeptics, and bystanders. Within this circle, figures like Marilee challenge the efficacy of charity while Wally Welty indulges Charlene’s drive, and the doctor punctures everyone’s illusions. These alliances and frictions spotlight The Role and Status of Women, showing how intelligence and ambition are squeezed into “acceptable” domestic forms—and how Charlene breaks that mold.
Across cultures, relationships are fraught with imbalance: Tricia’s affection for Ly and reliance on Minh-Linh exist alongside misunderstandings and asymmetrical power. Charlene’s projects, ostensibly for children, blur into control and spectacle, while the doctor’s stark witness reframes “help” as confrontation with chaos. Meanwhile, the marriages—Peter and Tricia’s devout partnership and Charlene and Kent’s brittle detente—reveal the era’s gender scripts: husbands do the “real” work of war; wives supply grace notes, unless, like Charlene, they seize the stage.