Alice McDermott recalls reading the novel “The Quiet American” as a college student in the 1970s and being struck by the ridiculousness of Graham Greene ’s female characters: “They were clichés, childish and unbelievable.” Although she was impressed by how “brilliantly” he foresaw the “political fiasco” of America’s time in Vietnam, she bristled over a scene in which the book’s narrator, a grizzled British journalist, gazes at some clean-looking “American girls” eating ice cream in the Saigon heat and envies their simple “sterilized world.” “It was so dismissive,” she says. “I remember, even at 19, thinking, ‘No, that can’t be right.’”“Absolution,” McDermott’s ninth novel, considers the rich interior lives of some of these seemingly ordinary “girls.” “Telling a familiar story from an unfamiliar perspective appeals to me,” says McDermott, 70, who lives in Bethesda, Md., with her husband, David Armstrong , a retired neuroscientist and the father of her three adult children. She says that reading Tom Stoppard ’s absurdist play about Hamlet’s friends, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” reinforced her fascination with what she calls “the underside of a story.” “I want to know what the minor characters are up to behind the scenes,” she says.

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Persons: Alice McDermott, Graham Greene ’, “, gazes, ”, ‘, can’t, McDermott, David Armstrong, Tom Stoppard ’, “ Rosencrantz, Guildenstern Locations: Vietnam, British, Saigon, Bethesda, Md