CHARACTER
Absolutionby Alice McDermott

Patricia "Tricia" Kelly

Patricia "Tricia" Kelly

Quick Facts

  • Role: Narrator and protagonist of Absolution; author of a long, reflective letter addressed to Rainey
  • First appearance: The novel’s opening frame (elderly narrator writing); story proper begins in 1963 with her arrival in Saigon at age 23
  • Background: Irish-Catholic newlywed from Yonkers whose “vocation” is to be a helpmeet to her husband, Peter Kelly, an engineer embedded with U.S. Navy intelligence
  • Key relationships: Charlene (mentor/foil), Peter Kelly (husband), Rainey (addressee of the letter), Stella Carney (college friend), Lily (Ly) (Vietnamese seamstress), the Unnamed American Doctor (encounter on the leper-colony trip), and the infant Suzie
  • Distinguishing note: Renamed “Tricia” by Charlene; dresses in a “Very Jackie” style that dramatizes her era’s expectations for proper American wives abroad

Who They Are Patricia “Tricia” Kelly begins as the archetypal “innocent American” in Vietnam: dutiful, well-meaning, and untested. The novel’s frame—a measured letter from her older self to Rainey—turns her life into an examination of intention versus consequence, especially as she navigates the moral gray zones of Saigon’s expatriate world. Her transformation, catalyzed by Charlene’s mentorship and by direct encounters with suffering, threads together the book’s core themes: American Naivete and Imperialism, The Role and Status of Women, and Morality, Good Deeds, and Absolution.

Tricia’s “look” is less a set of features than a ritual of performance—panty girdle, garters, sheath dresses with pinned shields, a bouffant “Very Jackie” hairdo slept into with rollers. Her painstaking grooming reads as armor and constraint, a bodily script for the midcentury wife whose poise must be labored into existence. In contrast, she perceives Vietnamese women as moving with an “effortless” grace she cannot imitate, underscoring both her cultural displacement and the pressure to perform ideal American femininity abroad.

Personality & Traits Tricia’s portrait is a study in contrasts: paralyzing shyness alongside piercing empathy; impressionability coupled with a growing ethical backbone. As a narrator, she is exacting and sensuous in detail, the self-scrutiny of age trying to make sense of the risky, often compromised kindnesses of youth.

  • Shy and insecure: Social events rattle her; she breathes to steady herself before speaking and dreads being stranded at parties. The garden-party humiliation (vomited on by Charlene’s baby) crystallizes her fear of being exposed as inadequate.
  • Conventional: Raised to see marriage as vocation, she models herself on 1960s ideals of wifehood—poise, deference, and support for Peter’s career—echoing her father’s values and her own “helpmeet” aspiration.
  • Impressionable and easily led: In college she trails the bolder Stella Carney; in Saigon, she is remade by Charlene, who dubs her “Tricia,” casts her as the saintly face of charity, and drafts her into schemes like selling Barbie-sized ao dais.
  • Compassionate: Her instinct is to respond to suffering—the street children at the market, the children’s hospital, and finally the moral crisis surrounding baby Suzie—often against the grain of social convenience.
  • Observant: She renders textures and gestures with a diarist’s acuity—dress shields, stocking seams, a lip of powder on a glass—reading status and emotion through surfaces while knowing her vantage is partial.
  • Emerging moral core: Exposure to wartime realities and Charlene’s manipulations forces her from passive sweetness toward action. The decisive refusal to keep Suzie is the ethical pivot that redefines her adulthood.

Character Journey Tricia’s arc—traced in the Full Book Summary—moves from compliance to conscience. Arriving in Saigon as “Mrs. Peter Kelly,” she is swept into Charlene’s orbit, rechristened “Tricia,” and used as a clever front for fundraising theatrics. Her miscarriages rupture the narrative of easy fertility and wifely success; in their wake, Charlene becomes both comforter and handler, offering raw female solidarity (a lay baptism) while tightening her moral grip.

The trip to the leper colony pushes Tricia past the edges of charitable spectacle into a confrontation with human extremity and the cynicism of the Unnamed American Doctor. Fear in the jungle and the breakdown of the truck strip away her illusions about control, good intentions, and the American capacity to “fix” things. Charlene’s “fait accompli” adoption of Suzie seems to offer Tricia the life she craves, but when the baby’s siblings appear at her gate, the moral price becomes undeniable. Returning Suzie to her family is Tricia’s first uncoached, irrevocable act—an assertion of principle that widens the fissure with Peter and loosens Charlene’s hold. The older narrator, writing to Rainey, accepts that telling the story is also shaping it, a self-aware act of meaning-making central to Memory, Storytelling, and Perspective.

Key Relationships

  • Charlene: Tricia’s most potent relationship: mentor, manipulator, and mirror. Charlene renames her, stages her as a “saint,” and channels her kindness into spectacles. Their intimacy deepens after the miscarriage (Charlene’s unsentimental baptism), but the same bond steers Tricia toward ethically murky “good deeds,” making Charlene both catalyst and cautionary figure.
  • Peter Kelly: Tricia initially idealizes Peter, treating her life as an extension of his career. The “first small fissure” opens when she withholds Charlene’s schemes; over time she recognizes his blind spots—particularly his faith in orderly systems—and grows beyond the limits of his worldview.
  • Rainey: As a child, Rainey draws Tricia into Charlene’s domestic sphere; as an adult, she becomes the addressee of the entire narrative. Writing to Rainey lets Tricia test her memories against another life shaped by Charlene, seeking not exoneration so much as clarity about complicity and care.
  • Stella Carney: A college forerunner to Charlene—fierce, politically driven, and resistant to polite compromise. Stella exposes Tricia’s early habit of orbiting stronger women, a habit Tricia must outgrow to claim an inner authority not borrowed from others.
  • Lily (Ly): The seamstress’s quiet competence and kindness (notably after the garden-party fiasco) counter the Americans’ noisy charity. In Lily, Tricia glimpses a model of dignity and agency that doesn’t require performance, expanding her sense of what a “good deed” might mean.

Defining Moments Even Tricia’s smallest choices accumulate into an ethical awakening; these scenes concentrate that change and show why it matters.

  • The garden party: Humiliated after being vomited on, she feels the gaze of the expatriate set and their standards of poise. Why it matters: The episode initiates her dependence on Charlene’s social guidance and introduces Lily’s gentler ethic, setting up competing models of womanhood and charity.
  • The first miscarriage (and lay baptism): The loss shatters her scripted future as wife-mother; Charlene’s ritual is both solace and co-optation. Why it matters: Tricia’s identity shifts from “promising future” to woman acquainted with grief, sharpening her empathy and her hunger for meaning.
  • The trip to the leper colony: Suffering on an overwhelming scale, the cynical Unnamed American Doctor, and the jungle breakdown jolt her from naïve benevolence into terror and doubt. Why it matters: The collapse of control exposes the hollowness of performative charity and primes her for genuine moral risk.
  • The “adoption” of Suzie: Charlene springs a solution to Tricia’s longing; the arrival of Suzie’s siblings exposes the theft beneath the gift. Why it matters: Returning Suzie is Tricia’s first fully independent moral act—she accepts loss rather than participate in harm—redefining her marriage, her friendships, and her self-respect.

Essential Quotes “My real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband.”

  • This line establishes Tricia’s baseline: a woman formed by midcentury ideals of feminine duty. It frames her arc as a move from supportive role to moral authorship, making her later defiance legible as growth rather than inconsistency.

“I felt the other partygoers turn to me, pausing in that second in which they remained well-dressed, neat, adult while I became the humiliated child.”

  • The gaze of the expatriate crowd reduces her to childishness, dramatizing how social performance governs belonging. The moment crystallizes Tricia’s shame and her vulnerability to rescuers like Charlene, who will exploit and shape that insecurity.

“I was to be the saint. The saint in her cabal.”

  • Tricia recognizes the role Charlene assigns her: moral cover for dubious acts. The phrase “in her cabal” exposes the politicking under the halo, suggesting that even charity can be cartelized and that Tricia’s goodness is being curated for effect.

“So now I was a woman who had had a miscarriage. So now we would begin again, the monthly hope and disappointment, now with a little more caution, a little more fear. Now the easy, fertile future—my part in our successful life together—was no longer so easy. Or so assuredly mine.”

  • Loss rewrites her identity sentence by sentence: hope, fear, and a new fragility. The repetition of “now” marks a before-and-after, complicating her marriage script and deepening the empathy that will later guide her hardest choice.

“I wanted this whole sojourn to be over. I wanted to go home. I wanted another kind of life, my own life. My own baby.”

  • Desire hardens into self-claiming; “my own life” breaks from the helpmeet’s ventriloquized purpose. The insistence on “own” anticipates her rejection of a morally tainted gift, proving that wanting is not the same as taking.