On Green Dolphin Street : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: It is hard for me to believe this book was written by the same author of Charlotte Gray and Birdsong! I am struggling to finish this book knowing full well that it is not going to improve one iota.

I find the characters weak and uninteresting. The affair between the faithful wife and this WWII veteran from Chicago turned journalist is hard to imagine.

This book is genuinely boring. How many bars, restaurants, geographic locations and prominent landmarks do we need to read about. Who cares! So the author is well travelled. This is an unimportant book.

There is not much else to say other than I truly believe this was written by someone other than Faulks or that he has lost what I found superb in Birdsong.

Rating:
Summary: Great book--but not my favorite!
Review: On Green Dolphin Street

Never thought the 60's could be interesting, but Sebastian Faulks manages to write about this politically turbulent time in a very intriguing manner. This novel is both a post-war/cold-war psychological study and a full throttle story of love's infidelity. It is always enjoying to read Faulks' British perspective, in On Green Dolphin Street it is particularly interesting to see America through these British eyes; particularly the Kennedy era. Mary is a well-developed character who provides a portal to a wealth of human emotion ranging from her strong attachment to her children, her moral struggles as the wife of an alcoholic and her wrenching grief when faced with death/dying.
This novel is quieter than all of Sebastian Faulks' other novels, but its message is just as deep and meaningful while delivering a history steeped in fact.


Rating:
Summary: Good love story in a great setting
Review: On Green Dolphin Street tells the story of a long triangle between Mary van del Linden, her husband Charlie, and Frank Renzo, a New York journalist. As important as the characters is the historical setting, which is America during the Nixon-Kennedy campaign. Faulks creates three vivid characters, each with their own motivations and weaknesses, and paints a love story that is passionate and filled with longing, but also with resignation.

What I liked about the book is the sense of urgency it creates and the mood it is set in. Among the main characters, Charlie is the one I felt more interesting. I also enjoyed the sections set in England when Mary's mother dies, how her feeling are wonderfully explored. Faulk's prose is literate although sometimes he gets too wordly when he describes the characters' thoughts, rendering them unreal. Also, I wasn't very interested in the politics.

All in all, a good read. Faulks proves his versatility with this novel. Don't expect another Birdsong though!

Rating:
Summary: An Absorbing and Sometimes Transporting Novel
Review: The U-2 incident. The Kennedy-Nixon debates. Smoky Greenwich Village bars and cool jazz (the book's title comes from a Miles Davis album). Do those seem like ancient history? Not to me. There's history --- and then there is History. The former is the kind you lived through; the latter happened before you were born. So it was a shock to realize that ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET, which opens in 1959, when I was 14, is a legitimate historical novel and it is tempting to be especially picky about the way Sebastian Faulks, an Englishman, goes about authenticating a period I think of as my private property.

The story centers on Charlie van der Linden, a diplomat assigned to the British embassy in Washington, D.C. and his wife, Mary. Around them swirls a Cold War aura of suspicion and a giddy Eisenhower-era enthusiasm for big cars, family values and lots of scotch. It's an uneasy mix that becomes even less stable when Frank Renzo, an American newspaper reporter, shows up at one of the van der Lindens' parties. Not only do he and Mary start an affair, but he and Charlie are, in a way, on parallel tracks: both have troubling memories of World War II and both were at Dien Bien Phu, the last stand of defeated French colonialism in Vietnam. But Charlie is visibly self-destructing: he drinks his life away ("He barely had hangovers anymore, just days of gastric terror and mental absence") and his outlook is suicidally bleak. Frank, though temporarily blackballed for suspect liberal sympathies, is fighting his way back to journalistic legitimacy; covering the presidential campaign is his big chance. He is based in New York and the two cities are an interesting contrast: the pristine surfaces of Washington, the down-and-dirty vitality of Manhattan.

The '50s and early '60s are trendy these days, what with Oscar-nominated movies like Far From Heaven and The Hours. And, as in the careful, self-conscious art direction of these films --- the vintage car rolling slowly across the screen --- the period details in ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET at first seem intrusive. We are regaled with descriptions of food (including "Salteen" crackers) and clothing (ads for Triumph Foundation Garments). An entire page is given over to Pennsylvania Station, which was torn down in a passion of urban renewal before New York awoke to the glories of older architecture. There are some heavy-handedly ironic winks and nudges, too, as when Frank thinks "the panic over the identity of the potential vice-president was morbid when Kennedy himself was so young" or he remarks of Vietnam, "We never could get American readers interested in that place."

Fortunately, the characters soon take over. Although Frank and Charlie have an attractive, Graham Greene-esque world-weariness and Mary seems initially to be one of those women trapped in housewifery, consumerism and motherhood (the very model for Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE), she turns out to be the most interesting of the three. Self-observing, imaginative and intelligent, she is nearly overwhelmed by the burdens of family love (the passages concerning her mother's death are among the strongest in the book) and the cold facts of mortality: "Only people in their wretched middle age had to face the truth, Mary thought; the slipped responsibilities of the old and young were hers alone to bear." At the same time, she is dazzled by the passion she feels for Frank, a love that seems to exist outside of time (an illusion sustained by the fact that the liaison is conducted almost entirely in New York) and drawn to the freedom he represents. Whether she will seize her opportunity for escape is a question that remains open to the very end of ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET.

The convergence of love and war (in this case more cold than hot) is familiar territory for Faulks, whose brilliant World War II trilogy (THE GIRL AT THE LION D'OR, BIRDSONG, CHARLOTTE GRAY) combines a powerful romantic streak with details of crushing realism, a sense of destiny with a sense of futility. Mary and Frank's relationship is a given, like a hurricane or tidal wave; it doesn't seem to suffer from the slings and arrows that ordinary lovers are constantly ducking. Yet for Mary it also represents a rediscovery of herself --- something she thought she'd lost forever with the death of her first sweetheart, David, in the war --- and in her moral conflict and emotional daring, she emerges as a woman of tremendous complexity and heart.

As the personal story gathers momentum, the political context seems to lose some of its stage-set stiffness. Faulks's account of the campaign, debate and election night is genuinely thrilling, even though we know how it will come out. The scenes at Dien Bien Phu prefigure the war that nobody wanted and the flashbacks to World War II recall the savagery of the war that everybody seems to agree was necessary. There is a cosmic sadness to these events, as if Faulks and his melancholy heroes are grieving in advance for greater troubles to come.

Frank and Charlie monopolize the politics; Mary relates to the wider world almost exclusively through the two men. While that may be accurate in terms of the role women were expected to play 40 years ago, it splits the book down the middle: Faulks never quite manages to fuse his story of love and personal transformation with the currents of social change. Nonetheless, ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET is an absorbing, sometimes transporting novel. Once I got off my "I was there" high horse, I realized that it captures much of the pace and music and swelling bohemianism of New York when I was young, as well as the mood of expectation that swept us: the country holding its breath, wondering what would happen next.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Rating:
Summary: Tender Love Story
Review: This story is centered during the Cold War in the 1960's, and tells the story of Mary van der Linden and the two men she loves. One is her husband who is posted to the British embassy in Washington, DC and may be at the top of his game. The other love is journalist, Frank Renzo. They meet at a cocktail party and for some unexplicable reason they fall in love. Mary has two children who attend private school and during the school year she is at loose ends. An affair ensues and she and Frank meet in New York and other cities where Frank is following the young Jack Kennedey in his presidential bid. Mary has a full life in Washington but a husband who is not present. He is fully involved in the Russian story of the Cold War, and it is this post that will make or break his career. He does not notice Mary's absences except for the break in his routine.
Mary is called suddenly to England to help care for her dying mother , and then to help her father re-set his life. During this time Charlie is called to Moscow, and Mary plans to join him when her father has his life in place.
Mary has a conundrum should she leave her husband- she is his life- what would he do without her - what would her children do? But she in so much in love with Frank, and he her. He appreciates her and helps nmake her life come alive. Much of the book centers on Mary's decisions and how she makes them. Mary is afterall a realist, a romantic at heart but a realist in mind.
One of Sebastain Faulks better books-

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing
Review: Very moody, atmospheric, with an underlying sense of foreboding. It makes me want to learn more about the early days of the Cold War. There's a scene of reporters covering the big election night that made me understand how difficult "up to the minute" reporting must have been back in 1960. The election was still neck and neck but they had to go to press and were forced to make educated decisions about where things were headed. They literally were not sure if their morning headline was going to ultimately be correct!

(By the way -- if you haven't read the book yet, beware of that extremely lengthy review from NYC because it's full of spoilers that would really mar your appreciation of the book.)