Absolution by Alice McDermott

To me this felt like "and now for something completely different"--it is a story that is centered in the convoluted thinking about why the US enters conflicts, which from the government side is almost exclusively to protect business interests, but it is hard to rally support and the loss of American lives around that, so there is the "white savior" motif that is sold to those on the ground, and that is where this book is nestled. This is a brief and caustic look at what this looks like in retrospect. It opens in Saigon in the early days of American involvement in Vietnam. The docile and conventional Patricia is the newest addition to a cabal of expat wives of soldiers and engineers, led by the charismatic Charlene. Charlene is a chain-smoking dynamo of caustic put-downs, vulpine glamour and a barely concealed tranquillizer habit. Impressionable Patricia goes along with her charitable fundraising scheme to sell Barbie doll-sized áo dài, the Vietnamese national garment rendered in perfect miniaturized detail by a talented local house girl, Ly--who gets paid a fraction of the profit for doing all the work. The book is filled with moral lessons as seen from a distance, a different way to present those paradigms, as well as the relative lack of agency that women were allotted at the time--strangely prescient of what was to come in the U.S. with the unthinkable overturning of Roe and the relegation of women of childbearing age in Red states to second class citizens in the 21st century.