On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

Book Overview

The bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray delivers an enthralling, vibrantly evocative novel set in America in 1960, when the country stood poised between the paranoia of the Cold War and the ebullience of the New Frontier. Faulks' heroine is Mary Van der Linden, a pretty, reserved Englishwoman whose husband, Charlie, is posted to the British embassy in Washington. One night at a cocktail party Mary meets Frank Renzo, a reporter who has...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375704566
• ISBN13: 9780375704567
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Haunting

I found that this book wouldn't let go. I found it hard to pick up another book as this one simply haunted me. His characters, and the era he evoked, became impossible to shake off. Magnificent.

Tender Love Story

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-

An Absorbing and Sometimes Transporting Novel

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, imaginat

Don't believe the critics

Even though I've read and enjoyed all of Faulk's other books I took a pass on "On Green Dolphin Street" when it first came out because of the mediocre reviews. Fortunately I happened to pick it up in the library and was so enchanted by the first two pages that I dropped everything else I was reading to finish it. Of all Faulks books I think it is best, if only for the fact it doesn't have all those distracting sub-plots like the grand-daughter in Birdsong and Charlotte's relationship with her father in Charlotte Gray. Mary van der Linden finds herself at age 40 with an alcoholic husband, two children who must be packed off to boarding school, a terminally ill mother and the attentions of an interesting newspaper reporter. How does she take care of everyone else and still be able to save herself? Faulk's writing is beautiful picking out wonderful details of life in the balance between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Frank and Mary make love with their words as much with their bodies. The scenes in which Mary and Frank try to keep their hands off one another are so filled with sexual tension you don't know whether to laugh or cry for them. Other scenes throughout the book are brilliant facets of a perfect gem. To be sure Faulks hasn't let go completely of his war stories. Both Frank and Mary's husband Charlie are scarred by their wartime experiences and still find themselves to soldiers of a sort in the Cold War. But it's Mary's battle to decide between the two men she loves that kept me turning the pages right up until the end.

DONT MISS IT !!!!!!

Faulks is a virtuoso with language, he reminds me of the way Joe Satriani plays a guitar, the words just flow with a sweet harmony. Having read Faulk's French trilogy I wanted a bit of a change. This book is set with the Cold War encroaching on every American's life as opposed to either of the "great" wars of this centuary. The main character Mary is confronted by the greatest decision of her life, should she stay or go for the greener grass on the other side? A beautifully developed storyline with characters that ooze personality traits somewhat different from Faulk's other novels. A must read for those who like compelling fiction.