Alice McDermott contends that women often avoid writing about women’s lives because they tend to be perceived as unimportant and focusing on them would lessen an author’s stature. McDermott, though, has specialized in creating novels featuring women, and she has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award and the National Book Award, as well as nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. She mines female interests, hoping to find the authentic character behind the masks that people wear.

The narrators of her novels tend to be Irish Catholic women — like her. Often, they live through the 1960s and are affected by civil rights, feminism, the upheaval of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and changes in the Catholic Church brought on by Vatican II. Most of them attended parochial elementary and high schools, where they were taught by nuns, and they often have friends who are nuns and still influence their behavior. They grew up middle class in New York — Brooklyn or Long Island — and envied their wealthier friends.

Some of the main characters in McDermott’s latest novel, Absolution, follow a similar trajectory. The plot concerns the circumstances faced by the wives of American men working in Saigon during the early days of the Vietnam War. Unlike most novels about that war, which center on men, Absolution features an elderly woman looking back at her past and connecting, in the present, to the daughter of her best friend from those days in Saigon. The friend died several years ago, and her daughter, feeling that she never really understood her mother, hopes to learn more about her.

The novel covers the time just before the war exploded, as American advisers and their families living in Vietnam tried to aid the South Vietnamese but found that their efforts only made the situation worse. It includes other highlights from the Sixties. There’s a civil-rights protest in Alabama, as two Catholic college students drive from New York to Montgomery to join their teacher, a nun, who along with several other sisters is marching for the integration of schools in the South.

The narrative, which switches between past and present and changes narrators, weaves together politics, guilt, and morality, especially as felt in the Catholic religion. In something of an inside joke, one of McDermott’s characters, Lily, bears the same name as the German-made doll Bild Lilli, popular in Europe in 1956 and the forerunner of Mattel’s Barbie.

The German doll was a novelty toy for men. The American Barbie plays a central role in this story and becomes a treasured heirloom by the book’s end. How that happens is the driving force behind McDermott’s somewhat frenetic narrative. Trying to raise money to alleviate Vietnamese misery, the American women create a Saigon version of the Barbie doll. Their action at first seems as clichéd as the doll itself and as the reference (intended or not) to the recent summer blockbuster film. But the doll puts food on the table of the poor and brings jobs to Vietnamese seamstresses and cloth-makers.

McDermott is adept at showing subtle shifts in expression or a certain look in the eyes that reveals feelings. She also has a knack for choosing the exact right word to turn an ordinary experience into an epiphany and to subtly highlight a word or an action, allowing it to accrue meaning.

The word “inconsequential,” for example, is repeated several times to describe the women’s charitable acts — as opposed to the military action of their husbands, which is supposedly heavy with significance. As the word is repeated, the irony of its meaning increases, thereby heightening the tension and suspense and suggesting that the women’s good works are filled with consequence. The word “absolution” in the title, and repeated in the text, evokes the Catholic sacrament of Penance and the forgiveness of sins, as McDermott offers numerous hints about the need to forgive others.

The novel has a slow start, with too many descriptions of clothing, make-up, suntans, Volkswagen Beetles, and Barbie dolls. At first, the two main characters, Charlene and Tricia, seem as artificial as the dolls they help to create and distribute. But, as the plot develops, it’s evident that they are not who they seem.

A Barbie-doll look-alike, Charlene has a tennis tan, slim figure, and strawberry-blond ponytail. She’s Episcopalian and jokingly puts down the Catholic Church and its rituals, which leads to friction with Tricia, a Catholic. But she’s also someone who will go out of her way for friends. An attractive newlywed, Tricia, after several miscarriages, is desperate to have a child. When Charlene comes up with a not exactly legal way to adopt a Vietnamese child, Tricia seems a pushover for the plan. But in the end, Tricia stands up for what is right.

Peter, Tricia’s husband, is an engineer, and Kent, Charlene’s husband, is the CEO of a major oil company. Both American men are helping the war effort. Kent is mapping the oil reserves in the China Sea. Peter is aiding the allied forces. It is suggested that the United States is in Vietnam not to defend the Vietnamese from the communists but to shore up the Catholic Diem government because President John F. Kennedy is also a Catholic. Others believe that the United States plans to take over the country’s rich oil fields once the Viet Cong are defeated.

Tricia and Charlene see the misery, poverty, and pain in Saigon, although their husbands seem blind to it. As the women confront the sorry state of America’s involvement in Vietnam, they face questions about the morality of the war and why it is being fought, moral concerns that continue to unfold in retrospect.

An especially disturbing scene occurs when the women visit a leper colony several miles outside of Saigon and see the patients there, some with missing body parts. Charlene decides to bring them new clothes and goody baskets. When some of the other women refuse to participate, she says it’s evil to turn away from human suffering as most people tend to do. McDermott has her subtly allude to W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” “Who wants to gaze at suffering?” Charlene asks facetiously. Suffering is so incongruous with the good order that people prefer. “We’re capable of turning away,” she adds, evoking Auden’s line that “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster” of Icarus, the boy falling out of the sky in Bruegel’s painting. Charlene’s perspective helps to elevate McDermott’s somewhat banal plot to literary fiction.

The story line unfolds through letters between Tricia and Charlene’s daughter Rainey, written 60 years past the time of the action. Rainey seeks out Tricia primarily to learn whether her mother had an affair while in Saigon but refused to leave her husband because of her love for her three children.

As the two women write letters, they realize that they did not grasp what was actually happening in Saigon. Nor did they appreciate Charlene. She wasn’t exactly an angel, but she met adversity with what can best be described as a spiritual elegance.