Alice McDermott: ‘Do we look with Graham Greene’s limited vision at such women? Maybe they’re more interesting than they seem’

Alice McDermott is known for writing “quiet” novels. “It drives me crazy,” she says. “My last novel began with a suicide and an explosion and a fire and everybody talked about what a quiet novel it was,” she laughs. “What do I have to do!”

Her eighth novel, Absolution, turns its attention not so much towards quiet subjects as silenced ones, focusing on the lives of the American women who lived in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

The idea for the novel came from another quiet source, Graham Greene’s classic 1955 novel, The Quiet American. “It’s an amazing novel,” McDermott says. “Very prescient about America’s blunders in Vietnam, he saw it all coming in 1955, but I remember even as an undergrad thinking, Graham Greene doesn’t know anything about the women in this novel.”

She references a particular scene where Greene’s narrator seems to dismiss some American women eating ice cream as clean, passionless, stupid. “For all the vision he had politically, he did not see the women’s movement coming at all,” McDermott says.

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Absolution is her corrective to Greene’s refusal to imagine full, essential and complicated lives for his female characters. It tells the story of Tricia, a shy young newlywed who has moved to Saigon with her attorney husband, who is working for US Navy intelligence. There she meets Charlene, an older woman, the established queen bee of the other wives, but also a deeply frustrated housewife with thwarted ambitions.

Do we look with Graham Greene’s limited vision at such women and say, ‘uncomplicated, passionless, clean’ and move on, rather than pausing and saying, ‘who were they? What was going on in their lives?’

When Charlene’s daughter contacts Tricia 60 years later, they look back at the lasting impact their time in Saigon had on their lives. Now elderly, Tricia is self-aware and gently mocking of herself as an innocent and earnest young wife in a bygone era. “One of the risks of trying to write from the point of view of someone from another era is that we apply a kind of presentism,” McDermott says, “like we know better. My obligation, in order to authentically channel the voice of someone who is not me, is to give full respect to their choices and their emotional state.

“It’s a plea for respect – don’t dismiss me because my life looked like this. I guess that speaks to what I was aiming for in the whole novel: don’t judge. Do we look with Graham Greene’s limited vision at such women and say, ‘uncomplicated, passionless, clean’ and move on, rather than pausing and saying, ‘who were they? What was going on in their lives? Maybe they’re more interesting than they seem’.”

McDermott’s characters are always more interesting than they first seem. Her 1998 novel Charming Billy, her best known, tells the story of an Irish-American alcoholic, which might sound like a tired old trope but instead, McDermott makes him unique.

“It seems to me this is what fiction does. Fiction says, ‘yes, those generalised statements about any of us have some truth and authority, but what about this one person?’ The conversation that opens Charming Billy is the people who knew him who are saying, ‘we’ll not see his like again, even though they know his like is everywhere’. But it’s that insistence on the individual, that insistence we all cling to: my life matters, my experience is unique, no matter how well it fulfils some broad generalisation.

“I think fiction is the thing that opens our eyes to that because it has the authority to put us behind the eyes of people who are not ourselves.”

There is a very important Catholic element in the politics of those years

—  Alice McDermott

McDermott was born in Brooklyn to an Irish-American family and brought up on Long Island and she regularly writes about Irish-American communities. Even in a novel set in Saigon, her characters cannot escape their Irish Catholic roots. Why does she return to that Irish-American demographic, even in a book that is ostensibly about American politics?

“There is a very important Catholic element in the politics of those years,” she says. “The Catholic president in Vietnam, the Catholic president in the United States, the defeat of communism that was so important to them. I do think the patriotism, the idea of self-sacrifice, that was very much a part of the American psyche at that time, is Irish and Catholic.”

While McDermott had planned on taking a research trip to Vietnam for Absolution, Covid put a halt to those plans and instead, she spent much of lockdown reading about Saigon. She had previously encountered many women who had lived in Saigon in the 1960s, but fascinating as their stories were, McDermott didn’t want to write a social history. “It’s not just the story,’ she says. ‘It’s how does this person’s life speak to what is at the heart of all our lives?” It’s as succinct a description as any of McDermott’s novels, and why their quietness speaks so loudly to anyone who reads her.

McDermott’s many prestigious achievements over the past four decades are kept ruthlessly in check by what appears to be a particularly Irish modesty – “don’t be getting ahead of yourself”, she calls it – but she would have every right to be proud. Three of her novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has been nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award. The French translation of her most recent novel, The Ninth Hour (2017), won the Prix Femina étranger and Charming Billy won the National Book Award. And yet her name is arguably not as well known as less accomplished writers.

A 2019 interview with The Paris Review includes a revealing story about McDermott. When she won the National Book Award, her writing students became distracted with excitement and so she offered $100 to anyone in the class who could name the previous year’s winner. Nobody could, and McDermott simultaneously reclaimed the class’s attention and made a quiet point about literary celebrity.

At the age of 70, she is now retired from teaching writing at Johns Hopkins University, a post she held for 23 years. It was a job she loved, but she felt it was time to make way for others. “Maybe this is the Catholic guilt, but I knew so many young women writers with families who could have benefited from it, so I felt kind of selfish hogging it.” How altruistic, I suggest, but realising that she is making herself sound saintly she gets another attack of Irish modesty and says, “more time to write was also in there. It wasn’t completely altruistic”.

Born into the postwar era of 1953, and coming of age in the nightmarish climate of Vietnam, it’s no surprise that war is an ongoing theme in her work

It would be remiss to end our conversation without asking for some free writing advice from such an experienced professor. Her primary advice to aspiring writers is to read everything. Next, she says, trust your instinct. “If you’re sincerely attempting to use language in the best way possible, things will happen. I guess this goes back to learning what the best part of this profession is. The real pleasure is in the composition. The best reward is the work. That’s not to say I’m a happy, delightful person while I’m composing. I’m miserable … when I say ‘the work is so rewarding’ everyone in my house will say, ‘it is? Because you’re a bitch to live with’,” she laughs. “But it’s that sense that literature and language and poetry is a gift.”

Born into the postwar era of 1953, and coming of age in the nightmarish climate of Vietnam, it’s no surprise that war is an ongoing theme in her work.

“There is this sense now, that we so much want to be outraged [about war] and yet we don’t stop. We keep heading into the same situations. Looking at what’s happening in Israel, the parallels in Vietnam, the sense of cascading violence we seem to be unable to stop … And yet there are also those emotions that remain while all this is going on: people are falling in love and having children and women are taking the responsibility for getting those kids raised, so there is that steady insistence on we keep going. We keep going into the same walls, but we keep going.”

The title of the book, Absolution, came as an epiphany about just how difficult it is to absolve the past. “We have a kind of arrogance about the political past and so much of what happened in Vietnam was politics, but I think it takes a leap of the imagination to say everything they did was disastrous. I don’t approve of any of it, but if I look at these people in their time and in their place and understand them from the inside out, I can begin to absolve them of what seems like their sins.”

This is what fiction does, she says. It allows us “put things in the wider context and see one another as fellow human beings struggling. None of us with the answers. None of us always going to do things as we should”.

• Absolution by Alice McDermott is published by Bloomsbury