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On Green Dolphin Street
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 covered stories from the fall of Dienbienphu to the Emmett Till murder trial in Mississippi. Slowly, reluctantly, they fall in love. Their ensuing affair, in all its desperate elation, plays out against a backdrop that ranges from the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to the smoke-filled rooms of the Kennedy campaign. A romance in the grand tradition that is also a neon-lit portrait of America at its apogee, On Green Dolphin Street is Sebastian Faulks at the peak of his powers.
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 covered stories from the fall of Dienbienphu to the Emmett Till murder trial in Mississippi. Slowly, reluctantly, they fall in love. Their ensuing affair, in all its desperate elation, plays out against a backdrop that ranges from the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to the smoke-filled rooms of the Kennedy campaign. A romance in the grand tradition that is also a neon-lit portrait of America at its apogee, On Green Dolphin Street is Sebastian Faulks at the peak of his powers.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Sebastian Faulks
48 books2,230 followersSebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He attended Wellington College and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, although he didn’t enjoy attending either institution. Cambridge in the 70s was still quite male-dominated, and he says that you had to cycle about 5 miles to meet a girl. He was the first literary editor of “The Independent”, and then went on to become deputy editor of “The Sunday Independent”. Sebastian Faulks was awarded the CBE in 2002. He and his family live in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 336 reviews
August 19, 2012
One of the most heartbreaking novels I have read - and I mean that in a good way. His character development was masterful, and I was drawn totally into their separate lives. To call this a romance or a love story is almost an insult to the deeper themes of the novel: familial unity; the role that morality, integrity, and responsibility plays in our lives; the occurrences in our lives that tear us apart mentally and emotionally. Faulks expressed the conflicting emotions of the lovers beautifully - wrenching though they were. And the depiction of the death of Mary's mother and Mary's reaction to it is one of the strongest pieces of writing that I have read. I cannot praise this book highly enough - all I can say is that I think it should be on everyone's reading list.
October 28, 2015
I was beginning to despair slightly of Sebastian Faulks. After being bowled over by Charlotte Gray and Birdsong I was underwhelmed by Engleby and The Girl at the Lion d'Or. They had vivid scenery and beautiful language but I could never quite connect with the characters in a way that compelled me to keep picking up the book. On Green Dolphin Street was completely compelling. I got completely wrapped up in the tangled lives of Charlie and Mary van der Linden and Frank Renzo. I grabbed every opportunity to read ten or fifteen pages to see what new turn the lives would take. This is Faulks at his best; laying bare the lives of ordinary yet heroic people as they go about their lives making decisions that sometimes make them and sometimes break them. This was the first book for some time where I found myself looking for spare minutes just to be able to pick it back up and now that it's done I feel maybe I should have read it even slower.
August 18, 2014
I full-on hated this book and I will never forgive Britain's Top 100 Favourites for making me read it, never.
July 18, 2010
Set in 1959 USA during the Kennedy /Nixon campaign Mary is the wife of Charlie Van der Linden – an emissary in the British Embassy in Washington – whose life is one long round of parties and lunch meetings and general socialising. You’d think she’d have a great life but Charlie is slowly disappearing into the bottle (3 dry martinis before lunch?) and she has attracted the attentions of one of the many American journalists who attend the parties at the Van der lindens home. When Mary and Charlie ship their children off to boarding school in the UK Mary is somewhat at a loose end and that is when the trouble really starts.
Sebastian Faulks takes us on journey of discovery of self assessment of challenge to the established order of things in 1959. A slow and thorough exposition for 95% of the book written in the imaginative, elegant and appropriate prose that makes Faulkes stories such a joy to read. The introduction of Mary’s mothers terminal cancer and the pain and anguish of dealing with the death of her parent from the other side of the Atlantic (transatlantic flights in 1959 were very different from those in 2009) make Mary’s deliberations even more difficult. In the aftermath of the presidential elections that put Kennedy into office Charlie is sent back to Moscow which causes a cataclysmic crash of emotions and desires for Mary and the crisis that Charlie walks into there, threatens to pull Mary into complete chaos.
The last 5% of the book is written with an urgency and passion so different from the rest of the book. Faulks manages to pull the stress, strain and confusion within the characters into words that make you feel you are living every second of the last 24 hours with the people in the story. Or is it that you have to have been pushed and pulled from country to country yourself to appreciate the pain and torment Mary is put through.
Sebastian Faulks takes us on journey of discovery of self assessment of challenge to the established order of things in 1959. A slow and thorough exposition for 95% of the book written in the imaginative, elegant and appropriate prose that makes Faulkes stories such a joy to read. The introduction of Mary’s mothers terminal cancer and the pain and anguish of dealing with the death of her parent from the other side of the Atlantic (transatlantic flights in 1959 were very different from those in 2009) make Mary’s deliberations even more difficult. In the aftermath of the presidential elections that put Kennedy into office Charlie is sent back to Moscow which causes a cataclysmic crash of emotions and desires for Mary and the crisis that Charlie walks into there, threatens to pull Mary into complete chaos.
The last 5% of the book is written with an urgency and passion so different from the rest of the book. Faulks manages to pull the stress, strain and confusion within the characters into words that make you feel you are living every second of the last 24 hours with the people in the story. Or is it that you have to have been pushed and pulled from country to country yourself to appreciate the pain and torment Mary is put through.
December 22, 2007
This was the first Faulks book I've read, although I know we have the French trilogy. The writing was gorgeous, which is good, because it wasn't the greatest story ever. It's about a British diplomat's wife who has an affair while living with her husband in Washington DC. I did like the depictions of the emotions involved in infidelity. She loves her--(Non sequitor: Hey, there's no male word for mistress, is there? That's weird, there should be. Mister? Master? Neither of those are right. It's like how there's no satisfying female equivalent of 'guy'.) Anyway, she loves Frank, the guy she's having an affair with, but she never stops loving her husband, who is an alcoholic undergoing a nervous breakdown and professional difficulties. When she is with her family, she feels like standing by them is the most important thing, but when she's with Frank, she feels like she can leave them behind for him. We get some chapters from Frank's perspective--he knows and likes the husband, and the husband's perspective, as he goes from ignorance to suspicion to certainty about the affair. I just thought it was a fairly honest portrayal of all emotions involved in infidelity--absolutely nothing is black and white.
Set in 1960, this all unfolds against the backdrop of Nixon and Kennedy's presidential campaigns and the cold war.
Set in 1960, this all unfolds against the backdrop of Nixon and Kennedy's presidential campaigns and the cold war.
September 28, 2008
I am a big fan of Sebastian Faulks, and I think this may be his finest effort to date. Like all his novels, this one is first and foremost an old-fashioned love story. As in Birdsong, this novel seamlessly weaves the personal and very intimate story of an accidental affair into a larger milieu of fairly grand (but always understated) significance. Indeed, it's impossible to imagine this story occuring in any other time, or any other way. The story alternates between Washington, DC and New York City in 1960s, and Faulks evokes the background political and social drama of the period, creating a perfect backdrop for the inner drama of his characters. Whether because I knew the physical setting so well (having lived in both cities), or because I came to know the characters so well, once begun I couldn't put the book down. Faulks tells this story masterfully.
March 22, 2015
A beautiful book that was a very thoughtful gift. There is so much to recommend this book that I do not have the words to describe so my review is simply that this will go into my top 20 books ever.
March 27, 2023
I enjoyed the first half of this book, but became more disinterested after that and skimmed till the end.
January 22, 2014
My first Sebastian Faulks, and I'm looking forward to more. Another Goodreads reader described it as "a complex and genuine love story...like watching real life unfold"--which seems pretty accurate to me. I don't usually read straight romance stories, and I guess this one is a bit more than that--but in any case it caught me from the first page. I thought it sagged a bit in the middle, when none of the relationships seemed to be moving anywhere, but the described world was shifting in ways that would eventually affect the characters and subsequently the story. All three characters in the love triangle are, to differing degrees, likeable, sympathetic, and admirable--a very difficult trick to pull off for any writer, I'd think. Every aspect of love and betrayal is considered, and Faulks does it all with apparent ease. He refuses to let you take sides in the adulterous affair. He also accurately captures D.C., New York, Chicago, London, Moscow, Vietnam when it was controlled by the French, bits of World War II, Kennedy, Nixon, and mutual affection and distrust between the Brits and the Americans. All with characters who feel like real people and with whom you enjoy spending time.
December 27, 2016
I loved this book; didn't want it to end. I was so sucked into Mary & Frank's romance.
Set during the election campaign of Nixon / JFK we meet Mary, wife of Charlie, and Frank. Frank is a newspaper reporter and Mary and Charlie are part of the British diplomatic service based in Washington DC.
Mary and Frank meet at a party at Mary and Charlie's house. Charlie is inebriated, and is for most of the book. Mary, on a trip to NYC without Charlie, finds herself in contact with Frank and the rest, as they say, is history.
Interspersed with historical references, this is the account of an extramarital affair. It isn't especially graphic in detail; the affair is strongly suggested.
Some reviews suggest it's a slow story but for me it set a good pace and it was one of those books I kept wanting to read and wanting more of.
Set during the election campaign of Nixon / JFK we meet Mary, wife of Charlie, and Frank. Frank is a newspaper reporter and Mary and Charlie are part of the British diplomatic service based in Washington DC.
Mary and Frank meet at a party at Mary and Charlie's house. Charlie is inebriated, and is for most of the book. Mary, on a trip to NYC without Charlie, finds herself in contact with Frank and the rest, as they say, is history.
Interspersed with historical references, this is the account of an extramarital affair. It isn't especially graphic in detail; the affair is strongly suggested.
Some reviews suggest it's a slow story but for me it set a good pace and it was one of those books I kept wanting to read and wanting more of.
July 12, 2016
I really disliked this book and dragged myself through it. The characters are self absorbed and impossible to like or care about. Worse than that, I felt like I was drowning in the turgid details.
March 30, 2021
The main fault of this book is that it's too true to life - it's not in any way 'novelistic'. This means that the main characters act out their lives solipsistically. They skid over the top of the momentous events of their time hardly noticing what is happening around them, even though one of them is close to the epicentre of the Presidential election and the another is a reluctant pawn in the Cold War.
This may make for realism but it lacks the excitement that a less literary writer would have injected. One example of this is when, towards the end of the book, the main character, Mary, wonders to herself whether the interplay between her, her husband and her lover could have been engineered by one of the clandestine agencies that around them. The thought occurs and then is lost in the more important concern of lighting a cigarette or pouring a drink. Another novelist would have grabbed the opportunity and put it at the heart of the plot that these people were puppets of forces with agendas beyond the confines of the love stories played out here.
In staying true to life and having world-changing events bubbling away like magma beneath the volcano of the characters' passions Faulks has persuaded me that he is a classier writer than I gave him credit for after Human Traces and A Possible Life but still this book left me feeling that, with this material, he could have given his readers a tad more excitement.
This may make for realism but it lacks the excitement that a less literary writer would have injected. One example of this is when, towards the end of the book, the main character, Mary, wonders to herself whether the interplay between her, her husband and her lover could have been engineered by one of the clandestine agencies that around them. The thought occurs and then is lost in the more important concern of lighting a cigarette or pouring a drink. Another novelist would have grabbed the opportunity and put it at the heart of the plot that these people were puppets of forces with agendas beyond the confines of the love stories played out here.
In staying true to life and having world-changing events bubbling away like magma beneath the volcano of the characters' passions Faulks has persuaded me that he is a classier writer than I gave him credit for after Human Traces and A Possible Life but still this book left me feeling that, with this material, he could have given his readers a tad more excitement.
April 4, 2017
This novel takes place in the late fifties and early sixties, when Americans were leading comfortable lives and the jazz music of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker was gaining popularity. Communism was the dreaded enemy of the time and anxiety over Russian weaponry and secret agents fueled fear that America might be losing the Cold War. In this heady mix, John F. Kennedy, a young, charming and rich presidential hopeful, was in the midst of a campaign for the highest office in the land, although there were fears among many about what a Catholic presidency would mean for the country. Such is the backdrop of Sebastian Faulk’s story about two men and a woman struggling to find satisfying lives and personal happiness. All three have been affected by the experience of past wars, experience which continues to haunt their present lives.
Charles van der Linden is a British diplomat posted to Washington, a man who is a recognized expert in American politics and who some believe has close ties to the entourage surrounding Kennedy. Charles is in trouble not only with his health but with his life. His investments are worth barely a third of what they were three years ago and he has borrowed money and changed brokers twice, but to no avail. His finances remain precarious and he is quickly descending into a financial black hole from which he may never recover. Although he has three children, he wishes he had none. They are expensive, wearisome and complicate his life.
In his position as a high flying diplomat, he lives a life with swanky parties, subsidized education for his children and frequent travel to exotic and interesting locales. But airplane flights terrify him and he cannot board a plane without downing three sedatives and half a bottle of scotch. Charlie’s drinking is completely out of control and he hardly eats solid food anymore, his hangovers of the past replaced with unending days of gastric upheaval. He once had a life that interested him, but the world has disappointed him and he is now bored and disillusioned. He feels there is no point in his work, nothing he does could not be done by someone else and he has no outlet for the deep rage that lies inside him that storms and rattles him every day of his life. If it wasn’t for his wife Mary, there would be nothing left for him to live for and he would finish it all. He is quite simply on the brink of a mental and physical breakdown.
Mary is a diplomat’s gift, always the supportive wife who looks just right, can mingle with the other wives, gives wonderful parties and even converses with the most intolerable of their friends. She makes all the decisions about the children, the house and how they live. All Charlie has to do is keep his career on track, a responsibility he no longer is able to bear. Mary’s view of the world is completely different from Charlie’s. She is a woman who loves living and is devoted to her children, her parents and her husband. She knows Charlie is drinking heavily but she is quietly holding things together. Although she is his wife, these days she is acting more like a mother to him.
Things change after the children leave for boarding school and Frank Renzo a newspaper reporter attends a party at Charlie and Mary’s Washington townhouse. Frank has been sent to Washington by his paper to do a piece on how people are viewing the upcoming election. When he meets Mary he feels a connection, so much so he fabricates an accident and goes back to the house once the party is over. Frank and Charlie spend the rest of the evening drinking while Mary tends Frank’s injured hand. Frank reminds Charlie they met long ago when both of them were in Indochina, but Charlie remembers nothing of that meeting.
Frank has been working to get back in the good graces of his editor after two incidents which have set back his career. His reporting during the McCarty years put him in the crosshairs of Hoover and the FBI and his editor received a warning. Things got worse when the reports he sent back from Mississippi on the racist murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till and the subsequent trial of two white men accused of his murder were out of sync with those done by other reporters and he was in trouble once again. He is outraged at people who make it impossible for those in his profession to report accurately what they see and hear without fear of reprisals. After paying his penance by reporting on low profile issues, he is hoping to restart his career by reporting on the upcoming election.
When Mary is on a visit to New York, Frank who lives in Greenwich Village offers to show her the sights. The two wander around the city, spending their time in a very different way than Mary would if she was with Charlie. They share a more bohemian experience, sampling life and food in the Bowery, Bleecker Street and the Village, going places Mary would never go by herself. Although Mary seems an unlikely candidate for infidelity, she and Frank fall into a passionate affair and Mary must ultimately make a choice between leaving her alcoholic husband or living the passionate life she has experienced only once before with her former lover David who was killed in the war. Mary battles internally with the need to support her husband, her fierce love for her children and her intense physical desire for Frank. During the affair she has periods where she feels shame, believing she is not the kind of woman who would do what she is doing. But she also realizes this is her last chance for true happiness.
Faulks, well known for his beautiful writing is not one to indulge in a romantic love story. But this novel is much more than that. Its characters are well drawn and their inner turmoil wrenchingly dramatized. Faulks uses his descriptive powers to bring the reader to the mucky trenches of the war, the off-beat smoky jazz haunts and the sights and sounds of New York City. He continues these detailed descriptions, bringing to life Mary’s nerve racking trip to Moscow with its seedy, dirty, time worn hotel rooms, complete with rust stained tubs, unadorned lightbulbs and hidden listening devices secreted but barely hidden behind the cracked covers of old light switches. The scenes of Mary’s dying mother and the time spent with her grieving father in London are especially well done and clearly the strongest in the book. At that time, Mary and her father’s exhaustion after days of staying up with Elizabeth is keenly felt and their quiet conversation after her death is poignantly rendered, easily bringing to mind a reader’s personal experience with a similar event.
Faulks reminds us of the lasting aftermath of war, how it continues to affect people after the last guns sound, never finished with those who participated in the carnage. It haunts their dreams, forces them to question their motives and explores how they felt both during and after the horrible act of killing another human being.
He also explores the commonly experienced conundrum of individual choice. Does one make choices based on one’s own needs or the needs of those who depend on you; an evocation of the age old dilemma of love versus duty.
There is an inherent sadness about this novel, a seeping melancholy that pervades its pages and hints at further sadness to come. Happiness is presented as a temporary experience, celebrated when it occurs before time pulls back to the burdens, obligations and encumbrances of everyday life.
Faulks is a celebrated and gifted story teller who continues to successfully provide the reader with fine writing. This novel is certainly no exception.
Charles van der Linden is a British diplomat posted to Washington, a man who is a recognized expert in American politics and who some believe has close ties to the entourage surrounding Kennedy. Charles is in trouble not only with his health but with his life. His investments are worth barely a third of what they were three years ago and he has borrowed money and changed brokers twice, but to no avail. His finances remain precarious and he is quickly descending into a financial black hole from which he may never recover. Although he has three children, he wishes he had none. They are expensive, wearisome and complicate his life.
In his position as a high flying diplomat, he lives a life with swanky parties, subsidized education for his children and frequent travel to exotic and interesting locales. But airplane flights terrify him and he cannot board a plane without downing three sedatives and half a bottle of scotch. Charlie’s drinking is completely out of control and he hardly eats solid food anymore, his hangovers of the past replaced with unending days of gastric upheaval. He once had a life that interested him, but the world has disappointed him and he is now bored and disillusioned. He feels there is no point in his work, nothing he does could not be done by someone else and he has no outlet for the deep rage that lies inside him that storms and rattles him every day of his life. If it wasn’t for his wife Mary, there would be nothing left for him to live for and he would finish it all. He is quite simply on the brink of a mental and physical breakdown.
Mary is a diplomat’s gift, always the supportive wife who looks just right, can mingle with the other wives, gives wonderful parties and even converses with the most intolerable of their friends. She makes all the decisions about the children, the house and how they live. All Charlie has to do is keep his career on track, a responsibility he no longer is able to bear. Mary’s view of the world is completely different from Charlie’s. She is a woman who loves living and is devoted to her children, her parents and her husband. She knows Charlie is drinking heavily but she is quietly holding things together. Although she is his wife, these days she is acting more like a mother to him.
Things change after the children leave for boarding school and Frank Renzo a newspaper reporter attends a party at Charlie and Mary’s Washington townhouse. Frank has been sent to Washington by his paper to do a piece on how people are viewing the upcoming election. When he meets Mary he feels a connection, so much so he fabricates an accident and goes back to the house once the party is over. Frank and Charlie spend the rest of the evening drinking while Mary tends Frank’s injured hand. Frank reminds Charlie they met long ago when both of them were in Indochina, but Charlie remembers nothing of that meeting.
Frank has been working to get back in the good graces of his editor after two incidents which have set back his career. His reporting during the McCarty years put him in the crosshairs of Hoover and the FBI and his editor received a warning. Things got worse when the reports he sent back from Mississippi on the racist murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till and the subsequent trial of two white men accused of his murder were out of sync with those done by other reporters and he was in trouble once again. He is outraged at people who make it impossible for those in his profession to report accurately what they see and hear without fear of reprisals. After paying his penance by reporting on low profile issues, he is hoping to restart his career by reporting on the upcoming election.
When Mary is on a visit to New York, Frank who lives in Greenwich Village offers to show her the sights. The two wander around the city, spending their time in a very different way than Mary would if she was with Charlie. They share a more bohemian experience, sampling life and food in the Bowery, Bleecker Street and the Village, going places Mary would never go by herself. Although Mary seems an unlikely candidate for infidelity, she and Frank fall into a passionate affair and Mary must ultimately make a choice between leaving her alcoholic husband or living the passionate life she has experienced only once before with her former lover David who was killed in the war. Mary battles internally with the need to support her husband, her fierce love for her children and her intense physical desire for Frank. During the affair she has periods where she feels shame, believing she is not the kind of woman who would do what she is doing. But she also realizes this is her last chance for true happiness.
Faulks, well known for his beautiful writing is not one to indulge in a romantic love story. But this novel is much more than that. Its characters are well drawn and their inner turmoil wrenchingly dramatized. Faulks uses his descriptive powers to bring the reader to the mucky trenches of the war, the off-beat smoky jazz haunts and the sights and sounds of New York City. He continues these detailed descriptions, bringing to life Mary’s nerve racking trip to Moscow with its seedy, dirty, time worn hotel rooms, complete with rust stained tubs, unadorned lightbulbs and hidden listening devices secreted but barely hidden behind the cracked covers of old light switches. The scenes of Mary’s dying mother and the time spent with her grieving father in London are especially well done and clearly the strongest in the book. At that time, Mary and her father’s exhaustion after days of staying up with Elizabeth is keenly felt and their quiet conversation after her death is poignantly rendered, easily bringing to mind a reader’s personal experience with a similar event.
Faulks reminds us of the lasting aftermath of war, how it continues to affect people after the last guns sound, never finished with those who participated in the carnage. It haunts their dreams, forces them to question their motives and explores how they felt both during and after the horrible act of killing another human being.
He also explores the commonly experienced conundrum of individual choice. Does one make choices based on one’s own needs or the needs of those who depend on you; an evocation of the age old dilemma of love versus duty.
There is an inherent sadness about this novel, a seeping melancholy that pervades its pages and hints at further sadness to come. Happiness is presented as a temporary experience, celebrated when it occurs before time pulls back to the burdens, obligations and encumbrances of everyday life.
Faulks is a celebrated and gifted story teller who continues to successfully provide the reader with fine writing. This novel is certainly no exception.
March 31, 2020
I’m a big fan of Sebastian Faulks, but this one just didn’t do it for me. I enjoyed his stories about WWI so much more. I think in this one it was too much love affair and too little Cold War. Still, he’s a beautiful writer, as will be seen from the quotes I pulled to post below.
Quotes that caught my eye
Among the row of new Cadillacs, their tail-fins glinting like a rumour of sharks…. (3)
…maybe not exactly happy, not in the facile way the word itself suggested, but who in these circumstances could not at least be touched from time to time by the ridiculous joy of existing? (8)
“By refusing to move they’re preventing customers being served.”
“But they are the customers.” (9)
The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in the basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets. (80-81)
The speeches and the broadcasts that encouraged volunteers at the start of 1942 appealed to ideas of freedom and tyranny, to homeland and to the right to live in peace. They did talk of courage and the idea of ‘sacrifice’, so that those who enlisted were aware that they might not return, what they did not mention was that the purpose of being a soldier was to kill other soldiers, and that, for most men, each killing would have an individual flavor. (80)
The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in a basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets. (80-81)
Yet despite what he said, Frank felt uneasy; he felt the hatred which pressed into his skin like the airless heat. (112)
But the case of Emmett Till looks like an exception….
He quoted from the comments of the foreign press to show how the case had caused American’s stock to fall in the eyes of the free world, and, more shamingly, the unfree world. The war against the Russians was apparently being lost in space and in the development of arms; the United States was now in danger of squandering its only unassailable advantage: the moral superiority conferred by constitutional rights.
Ten days later his editor received a visit from two agents of the FBI, who were compiling reports which would, unofficially, be handed over to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s investigation six employees of the New York Times alleged to be Communists; even the music and the dance3 reviewers of the Times were on an FBI Security Index that permitted them to be deported to detention camps if an ‘internal security emergency’ occurred. (118)
“Does she know enough about suburban adultery?” said Edward.
“I’m sure I could find out, Eddie.” (123-24)
Her husband’s hobbies are drinking liquor, taking barbiturates and Benzedrine tablets, smoking cigarettes and misquoting poetry. She wrote this book so she could pursue a platonic but passionate adulterous love affair in New York City with a newspaperman she barely knows, who is mostly out of town. (124)
…matters that had seemed provisional or capable of endless procrastination had acquired the dull imminence of fact: death happened, death was coming and she herself was going to die, inexplicably, unsatisfactorily, like her mother, like everyone else, with burial, extinction, no questions answered and no ends tied off. (125)
Some men are born relaxed, some achieve relaxation through Yoga or Zen and some find relaxation thrust upon them via suits of Folkweave Tweed. The gentleman in the picture had certainly achieved a self-assured air; so much so, Mary noticed, that next to his folk weave tweed suit he was clutching a nine-inch upright model of a US Navy Polaris missile. (127)
There was no fight number for the press plane, no check-in; you walked across the airfield apron, left your bag beneath the open hold if you wanted it stowed, then climbed aboard, found a seat and, when the attendant had shut the cabin door, you took off. There were seat belts, but no one wore them because they prevented you from turning round and sharing drinks and notes with the reporters in the row behind. (128)
There was a murmur of anticipation as the small aircraft reached the steepest angle of its climb. The curtain at the front parted, Senator Kennedy emerged and sat down on a wooden tray; he joined his hands round his feet and tobogganed down the aisle into the restraining arms of his junior press secretary at the rear of the plane. (128)
Forgive me my sins, his wild gaze seemed to say, forget my reckless love of women, overlook my wealth and East Coast homes, because at heart I am like you. (129)
Frank noticed the stitching in his clothes, his manicured hands and the easy manner that came from years of parties in Hyannisport and Martha’s Vineyar4d, of dating debutantes and making furtive love also to their mothers; of yacht clubs and dinner parties, cigars and tennis; of law school and oak-panelled rooms and charge accounts on which you bought shirts by the dozen. Frank found they raised in him an instinctive distrust – a reaction he could no more control than the reflex of a struck knee. (129)
She tried not to hurry as she went through the turnstile but to keep some dignity; the fact that Franck had called to say he was back in New York did not mean to say she had to lose all sense of her own freedom of action. (131)
He sometimes pictured the workings of his mind as the jeweled movement of a Swiss watch, trembling with expensive fibrillation, into which he had poured sand. Yet what had he or the world lost by this wantonness? There was no sign that a careful husbanding of the machinery would have produced anything that would have helped to give value or meaning to his or any other existence. (135)
The thing about being forty, she thought, was that while you had the feelings of a twenty-five year old, at least you had some dignity. (145)
She could squeeze the minutes; with seconds of such intensity, she could knead them into days. (147)
…overcoming her unease with American coins, she bought a paraffined-paper cup from a vending machine for a penny and filled it from a drinking fountain…. (148)
We’re pouring money in to help the French. They’ve got some crazy plan to lure the Vietminh out of the bush and blow them away once and for all. (151)
The French government had long since stopped paying for its army, which was now funded by the United States; American planes and material followed the dollars, and naturally they needed mechanics to service them. The point at which engineers became troops was a matter of intense concern, since it would then become an American war, something not even Dulles wanted. (153)
…supporters of the nationalist Vietminh were Marxist in their belief, the State Department argument ran; therefore the French must not be defeated. (153)
Dulles turned the full force of his persuasions on to Winston Churchill, a man with some record in conflict, but received in return only a lecture on colonialism and the loss of India. (153)
Nowhere could a war zone have been more torpid, Frank thought, as he walked down the dusty streets with their Second Empire facades and backyard chicken runs. America was there and not there in this humid and beautiful backwater; the wishes of the Dulles brothers, the tense edicts of Langley and ‘Foggy Bottom, the phrases such as ‘line of dominoes’ were discounted and absorbed by the air in which they were uttered, with the smoke of opium and the steam of noodle soup from the open-backed kitchens. (154)
He drank quickly, to quell his misgivings and to catch up with Charlie. He started to grow used to the strange nature of his situation; the guilt began to ebb. It reminded him of what he had told Roxanne about killing a man. After a while it feels like everything you do: it feels like nothing at all. (156)
…there was something profoundly strange about this clearing in the jungle where the flower of St Cyr officers, their heads full of European gunnery tactics, had brought a collection of troops to provoke a people they hardly knew in the colony that had been returned to them after the disgrace of Vichy only because the Americans and British had not use for it. this giant folly of pride, greed and quixotic ambition was about to receive, as far as Charlie could see, a cataclysmic judgement. (162)
Behind a floral curtain on a wire, she discovered a fridge with a levered handle like those on the door of a butcher’s cold room. It was admirably cold inside, but empty except for a swollen ice-tray dusted with frost crystals of an age to grace a mammoth’s tomb. (189)
She had once felt that what she loved and valued was made eternal or innumerable by her passion for it, but in the last few months – belatedly, perhaps – she had come to recognize that the instances of bliss were numbered as unforgivingly as the streets of the city, and that the edge of the island, once only a dream of explorers, was now in plain view. (215)
If you say that only what lasts is worthwhile, then nothing is valuable, because everything passes. Isn’t it enough that something should have existed, just once? Don’t you think it continues to exist in some world where the pettiness of time is not so important? (216)
Something like that, but not just a convenient solution. An explanation, a way of properly ordering value. An eternity that is more than just time without ending. A place where time runs in a different way. (216)
She felt that she could not secure the bliss that should be hers because of some verbal shortcoming, the unwillingness of what she passionately felt to made itself available to words. It was hard to bear. (217)
…the walnut sideboard held its usual load of unread newspapers, orphaned keys and post too dull or intimidating to be opened. (218)
I feel suddenly very Republican. Nixon’s not such a bad man, is he? (260)
They mounted the steps to the doors of the Ukraina. It was a building of gross imperial intent, in which considerations of design or beauty had been sacrificed to a display of skyscraping power, constructed by the slave labour of defeated Germans to the glory of the Soviet Union, one of seven Stalin monuments that lowered over the city. (286)
Hell might be this reeking grey corridor, with its straight lines that converged to a never-realized vanishing point. (303)
Quotes that caught my eye
Among the row of new Cadillacs, their tail-fins glinting like a rumour of sharks…. (3)
…maybe not exactly happy, not in the facile way the word itself suggested, but who in these circumstances could not at least be touched from time to time by the ridiculous joy of existing? (8)
“By refusing to move they’re preventing customers being served.”
“But they are the customers.” (9)
The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in the basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets. (80-81)
The speeches and the broadcasts that encouraged volunteers at the start of 1942 appealed to ideas of freedom and tyranny, to homeland and to the right to live in peace. They did talk of courage and the idea of ‘sacrifice’, so that those who enlisted were aware that they might not return, what they did not mention was that the purpose of being a soldier was to kill other soldiers, and that, for most men, each killing would have an individual flavor. (80)
The closest he had come to political action was to go with his brother Louis one night in Chicago, at the age of sixteen, to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League in a basement on California Avenue, because Louis had promised him they would meet hot girls in low heels and leather jackets. (80-81)
Yet despite what he said, Frank felt uneasy; he felt the hatred which pressed into his skin like the airless heat. (112)
But the case of Emmett Till looks like an exception….
He quoted from the comments of the foreign press to show how the case had caused American’s stock to fall in the eyes of the free world, and, more shamingly, the unfree world. The war against the Russians was apparently being lost in space and in the development of arms; the United States was now in danger of squandering its only unassailable advantage: the moral superiority conferred by constitutional rights.
Ten days later his editor received a visit from two agents of the FBI, who were compiling reports which would, unofficially, be handed over to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s investigation six employees of the New York Times alleged to be Communists; even the music and the dance3 reviewers of the Times were on an FBI Security Index that permitted them to be deported to detention camps if an ‘internal security emergency’ occurred. (118)
“Does she know enough about suburban adultery?” said Edward.
“I’m sure I could find out, Eddie.” (123-24)
Her husband’s hobbies are drinking liquor, taking barbiturates and Benzedrine tablets, smoking cigarettes and misquoting poetry. She wrote this book so she could pursue a platonic but passionate adulterous love affair in New York City with a newspaperman she barely knows, who is mostly out of town. (124)
…matters that had seemed provisional or capable of endless procrastination had acquired the dull imminence of fact: death happened, death was coming and she herself was going to die, inexplicably, unsatisfactorily, like her mother, like everyone else, with burial, extinction, no questions answered and no ends tied off. (125)
Some men are born relaxed, some achieve relaxation through Yoga or Zen and some find relaxation thrust upon them via suits of Folkweave Tweed. The gentleman in the picture had certainly achieved a self-assured air; so much so, Mary noticed, that next to his folk weave tweed suit he was clutching a nine-inch upright model of a US Navy Polaris missile. (127)
There was no fight number for the press plane, no check-in; you walked across the airfield apron, left your bag beneath the open hold if you wanted it stowed, then climbed aboard, found a seat and, when the attendant had shut the cabin door, you took off. There were seat belts, but no one wore them because they prevented you from turning round and sharing drinks and notes with the reporters in the row behind. (128)
There was a murmur of anticipation as the small aircraft reached the steepest angle of its climb. The curtain at the front parted, Senator Kennedy emerged and sat down on a wooden tray; he joined his hands round his feet and tobogganed down the aisle into the restraining arms of his junior press secretary at the rear of the plane. (128)
Forgive me my sins, his wild gaze seemed to say, forget my reckless love of women, overlook my wealth and East Coast homes, because at heart I am like you. (129)
Frank noticed the stitching in his clothes, his manicured hands and the easy manner that came from years of parties in Hyannisport and Martha’s Vineyar4d, of dating debutantes and making furtive love also to their mothers; of yacht clubs and dinner parties, cigars and tennis; of law school and oak-panelled rooms and charge accounts on which you bought shirts by the dozen. Frank found they raised in him an instinctive distrust – a reaction he could no more control than the reflex of a struck knee. (129)
She tried not to hurry as she went through the turnstile but to keep some dignity; the fact that Franck had called to say he was back in New York did not mean to say she had to lose all sense of her own freedom of action. (131)
He sometimes pictured the workings of his mind as the jeweled movement of a Swiss watch, trembling with expensive fibrillation, into which he had poured sand. Yet what had he or the world lost by this wantonness? There was no sign that a careful husbanding of the machinery would have produced anything that would have helped to give value or meaning to his or any other existence. (135)
The thing about being forty, she thought, was that while you had the feelings of a twenty-five year old, at least you had some dignity. (145)
She could squeeze the minutes; with seconds of such intensity, she could knead them into days. (147)
…overcoming her unease with American coins, she bought a paraffined-paper cup from a vending machine for a penny and filled it from a drinking fountain…. (148)
We’re pouring money in to help the French. They’ve got some crazy plan to lure the Vietminh out of the bush and blow them away once and for all. (151)
The French government had long since stopped paying for its army, which was now funded by the United States; American planes and material followed the dollars, and naturally they needed mechanics to service them. The point at which engineers became troops was a matter of intense concern, since it would then become an American war, something not even Dulles wanted. (153)
…supporters of the nationalist Vietminh were Marxist in their belief, the State Department argument ran; therefore the French must not be defeated. (153)
Dulles turned the full force of his persuasions on to Winston Churchill, a man with some record in conflict, but received in return only a lecture on colonialism and the loss of India. (153)
Nowhere could a war zone have been more torpid, Frank thought, as he walked down the dusty streets with their Second Empire facades and backyard chicken runs. America was there and not there in this humid and beautiful backwater; the wishes of the Dulles brothers, the tense edicts of Langley and ‘Foggy Bottom, the phrases such as ‘line of dominoes’ were discounted and absorbed by the air in which they were uttered, with the smoke of opium and the steam of noodle soup from the open-backed kitchens. (154)
He drank quickly, to quell his misgivings and to catch up with Charlie. He started to grow used to the strange nature of his situation; the guilt began to ebb. It reminded him of what he had told Roxanne about killing a man. After a while it feels like everything you do: it feels like nothing at all. (156)
…there was something profoundly strange about this clearing in the jungle where the flower of St Cyr officers, their heads full of European gunnery tactics, had brought a collection of troops to provoke a people they hardly knew in the colony that had been returned to them after the disgrace of Vichy only because the Americans and British had not use for it. this giant folly of pride, greed and quixotic ambition was about to receive, as far as Charlie could see, a cataclysmic judgement. (162)
Behind a floral curtain on a wire, she discovered a fridge with a levered handle like those on the door of a butcher’s cold room. It was admirably cold inside, but empty except for a swollen ice-tray dusted with frost crystals of an age to grace a mammoth’s tomb. (189)
She had once felt that what she loved and valued was made eternal or innumerable by her passion for it, but in the last few months – belatedly, perhaps – she had come to recognize that the instances of bliss were numbered as unforgivingly as the streets of the city, and that the edge of the island, once only a dream of explorers, was now in plain view. (215)
If you say that only what lasts is worthwhile, then nothing is valuable, because everything passes. Isn’t it enough that something should have existed, just once? Don’t you think it continues to exist in some world where the pettiness of time is not so important? (216)
Something like that, but not just a convenient solution. An explanation, a way of properly ordering value. An eternity that is more than just time without ending. A place where time runs in a different way. (216)
She felt that she could not secure the bliss that should be hers because of some verbal shortcoming, the unwillingness of what she passionately felt to made itself available to words. It was hard to bear. (217)
…the walnut sideboard held its usual load of unread newspapers, orphaned keys and post too dull or intimidating to be opened. (218)
I feel suddenly very Republican. Nixon’s not such a bad man, is he? (260)
They mounted the steps to the doors of the Ukraina. It was a building of gross imperial intent, in which considerations of design or beauty had been sacrificed to a display of skyscraping power, constructed by the slave labour of defeated Germans to the glory of the Soviet Union, one of seven Stalin monuments that lowered over the city. (286)
Hell might be this reeking grey corridor, with its straight lines that converged to a never-realized vanishing point. (303)
February 9, 2015
This was a "Back to the Future" experience for me; the era of my youth as a nine to ten year old, height of the developing cold war, immersed in the WWII war weary, the advance of communism and fronts (for New Zealand) in Korea, Malaysia, and Viet Nam emerging -- a powerful and accurate portrayal of the adult world I inherited and was moving with.
Initially I anticipated a John Le Carre type spy intrigue, and lack of this was a continuing disappointment until I was gripped by the deja vu unfolding in the love story. And herein lay the deep perceptions so more powerful than indulgence, politics, and war experience; and so more soul searching in living in the here and now what e'er the age.
Initially I anticipated a John Le Carre type spy intrigue, and lack of this was a continuing disappointment until I was gripped by the deja vu unfolding in the love story. And herein lay the deep perceptions so more powerful than indulgence, politics, and war experience; and so more soul searching in living in the here and now what e'er the age.
January 24, 2009
Sebastian Faulks is a superb writer - he feeds his readers bit by bit, and just when you think you can read his mind, he changes course. I loved every paragraph.
July 8, 2013
Early Sebastian Faulks novels convey a wonderful sense of time and place and ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ set in 1959, evokes perfectly the period of the later Cold War, the insidious investigations of the FBI, McCarthyism, U2 Spy Planes, the rise of JFK and his historic election victory of Nixon, Race Riots in Mississippi. This is a wonderful read - and for my money, this is easily Faulks' best novel – as, against this ground breaking backdrop he explores one of Life's most dangerous imponderables: should one stay true to one’s traditional upbringing and marital vows and live a restrained life not knowing what lies beyond the realms of respectability and convention, or surrender to one’s animal impulses and explore, dangerously, deviously and sensually an extra marital affair, and live life to the full no matter the consequences. But this is far more than a will she/ won’t she dilemma, as Faulks explores the essence of intimacy and attraction, need and dependency, and examines the explosive power of desire, and dangerous loss of self control. He captures vividly the emotional plight of two lost souls feverishly grasping opportunity and beginning an emotional journey that is life affirming but imbued with inevitable consequences that must be confronted.
His characterization is faultless as the central characters, all flawed in their different ways, confront their future lives with the very real possibility of letting their last chance of happiness slip through their fingers.
As Julie Myerson literature critic and author declared in The Observer, this book "is one of the most heart-shakingly accurate depictions of how it feels to be female and in love that I have ever read". Each character has their vulnerabilities, but their inner strengths are also well delineated.
For the timorous Mary,
'Everything had come at once, the tenderness, desire, the sublime simplicity of happiness that depended only on his presence and his face, the fierce knowledge that told her it was him or nothing but the void. And that it should have come at this time in her life, when she had thought that such things were past.'
Mary has been a 'good girl' and is now a dutiful diplomatic wife approaching middle age, when she experiences an unexpected sexual awakening that shocks her by its rapturous power and urgency.
'At this moment, for the first time in her life, she had experienced the transcendent combination of the fierce tenderness, such as she felt for Richard and Louisa (her young children) with the physical desire that had once before raged, many years ago, with David Oliver (her first lover) and which she had resigned herself never again to know. The simultaneous experience of the two feelings was not a simple addition of their respective effects; it felt to Mary as though the force was squared. She could not imagine how she was supposed to deal with it; but it felt like death - imperative, unavoidable, the only issue.'
" The practicalities of what she had fallen into and the vocabulary for them - 'affair' and 'infidelity' - had seemed to her banal and inadequate; she had always believed the adventure of marriage was incomparably more interesting than the petty indulgence of betrayal "
Frank Renzo reflects upon his time in New York,
' The city made him feel he could be many people, that in his middle thirties he was nowhere near the finished version of himself, and that even if he ever got there, that too might turn out to be provisional - not a stable compound of temperament and experience, but a bundle of momentary inclinations.'
For Frank, also, an all consuming passion comes with a compelling immediacy like first love,
‘ When he first saw Mary standing in front of the table in her sitting room…he had the sense of already knowing her profoundly well. The way he then behaved…. Was unprecedented but that was inevitable as she had opened up in hima depth of anxiety and desire that he had previously never known, and a new fever demanded a new remedy.’
Mary, too, finds their all consuming passion so intense that separation leaves her bereft as with a bereavement, and she reflects upon the morality of her life-shaping dilemma,
‘ To have him, be with him, see him, be part of him, is a natural imperative, because in some way he is me, my inner self.’
"He raked his fingers through her hair, down to the skull, as his body filled hers. All the way, he thought, I will go all the way, till I find her; and with her head between his hands he too let out a cry, because he felt pity for her soul."
‘ As her thought became less coherent, she closed her eyes…. The deeper into sensation she went…the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other or beyond; it was like death or very near it.’
His characterization is faultless as the central characters, all flawed in their different ways, confront their future lives with the very real possibility of letting their last chance of happiness slip through their fingers.
As Julie Myerson literature critic and author declared in The Observer, this book "is one of the most heart-shakingly accurate depictions of how it feels to be female and in love that I have ever read". Each character has their vulnerabilities, but their inner strengths are also well delineated.
For the timorous Mary,
'Everything had come at once, the tenderness, desire, the sublime simplicity of happiness that depended only on his presence and his face, the fierce knowledge that told her it was him or nothing but the void. And that it should have come at this time in her life, when she had thought that such things were past.'
Mary has been a 'good girl' and is now a dutiful diplomatic wife approaching middle age, when she experiences an unexpected sexual awakening that shocks her by its rapturous power and urgency.
'At this moment, for the first time in her life, she had experienced the transcendent combination of the fierce tenderness, such as she felt for Richard and Louisa (her young children) with the physical desire that had once before raged, many years ago, with David Oliver (her first lover) and which she had resigned herself never again to know. The simultaneous experience of the two feelings was not a simple addition of their respective effects; it felt to Mary as though the force was squared. She could not imagine how she was supposed to deal with it; but it felt like death - imperative, unavoidable, the only issue.'
" The practicalities of what she had fallen into and the vocabulary for them - 'affair' and 'infidelity' - had seemed to her banal and inadequate; she had always believed the adventure of marriage was incomparably more interesting than the petty indulgence of betrayal "
Frank Renzo reflects upon his time in New York,
' The city made him feel he could be many people, that in his middle thirties he was nowhere near the finished version of himself, and that even if he ever got there, that too might turn out to be provisional - not a stable compound of temperament and experience, but a bundle of momentary inclinations.'
For Frank, also, an all consuming passion comes with a compelling immediacy like first love,
‘ When he first saw Mary standing in front of the table in her sitting room…he had the sense of already knowing her profoundly well. The way he then behaved…. Was unprecedented but that was inevitable as she had opened up in hima depth of anxiety and desire that he had previously never known, and a new fever demanded a new remedy.’
Mary, too, finds their all consuming passion so intense that separation leaves her bereft as with a bereavement, and she reflects upon the morality of her life-shaping dilemma,
‘ To have him, be with him, see him, be part of him, is a natural imperative, because in some way he is me, my inner self.’
"He raked his fingers through her hair, down to the skull, as his body filled hers. All the way, he thought, I will go all the way, till I find her; and with her head between his hands he too let out a cry, because he felt pity for her soul."
‘ As her thought became less coherent, she closed her eyes…. The deeper into sensation she went…the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other or beyond; it was like death or very near it.’
September 1, 2023
Bowled over again by the maestro, man doesn’t miss
December 4, 2010
Enjoyable book but not really one of Faulk's best. Good things about the book were how well written it was and the style of the language that I have come to expect and truly adore from a Faulks novel. As usual his way of invoking the sense of place is outstanding, got a real feel for Washington D.C and particularly 1950's New York. The development of character and story was also decent although both the characters and the storyline was not as memorable, thought provoking or in some ways as beautiful as those in the French Trilogy, Human Traces or Even A Week in December. However my main problem with On Green Dolphin Street was I found that the language often seemed gratuitous and fluffy which took away from the characters and story in parts. It made the romance and characters sometimes seem unbelievable. I usually love the way Faulks uses language but it seems as in this novel it was a step too far.
That said I would recommend the book as even Faulk's poorer novels are better than a lot of stuff out there at the minute.
That said I would recommend the book as even Faulk's poorer novels are better than a lot of stuff out there at the minute.
September 17, 2020
I feel like I should be enjoying this author more than I am. Perhaps it’s because I started with A Week in December, and then this one. Faulks is obviously a strong writer and develops characters well. But A Week in December fetishized perspective by choosing a different one every chapter, making it a gimmick. On Green Dolphin Street had some great characters — Charlie and Mary, of course, as 2 of the 3 main characters — but Frank Renzo was a cartoon of a character. That would be fine if he wasn’t, oh I don’t know — the main love interest that tempted Mary to (perhaps, maybe, should she, shouldn’t she) leave her husband and family. For what? A two dimensional news reporter who couldn’t be more ripped from an Ellery Queen mystery novel if he actually wore a porkpie hat, had an apartment over a Chinese restaurant, and called her baby and kiddo. Puh-leeze. All of which is to say I’m about to read Birdsong in the hopes that the good reviews on Faulks — and the regular comparisons to Wm Boyd — have some factual basis, some where.
April 28, 2021
This book was far too slow for me.
Set against the backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon contest of the 1960s it follows the relationships between 3 main characters – an alcoholic, unstable English diplomat, his wife and the American newspaperman with whom she develops a passionate affair.
I was drawn to the book by its cover description which promised “the terror of the cold war”, but there’s precious little of that. I found myself skimming paragraphs, unusual for me, in an attempt to move on to something more engaging than the continuous “I love you so much” stuff that I found gruelling.
I was disappointed because I have read other stuff by Sebastian Faulks – Engleby was, in my view, excellent.
I am giving my stars for the unnervingly accurate picture of a functioning alcoholic’s relationship with the bottle. Some lessons there, if nothing else.
Set against the backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon contest of the 1960s it follows the relationships between 3 main characters – an alcoholic, unstable English diplomat, his wife and the American newspaperman with whom she develops a passionate affair.
I was drawn to the book by its cover description which promised “the terror of the cold war”, but there’s precious little of that. I found myself skimming paragraphs, unusual for me, in an attempt to move on to something more engaging than the continuous “I love you so much” stuff that I found gruelling.
I was disappointed because I have read other stuff by Sebastian Faulks – Engleby was, in my view, excellent.
I am giving my stars for the unnervingly accurate picture of a functioning alcoholic’s relationship with the bottle. Some lessons there, if nothing else.
August 5, 2023
- hate mary she's such a manic pixie dream girl
- pacing weird
- liked charlie's whole messy arc ➝ well portrayed mental illness
- oml the whole 'i can fix him'
- literally no chemistry
- but an enjoyable read overall (?)
- good points
HJFLHAFSD I DON'T LIKE THE CHARACTERS AND THE PLOT IS SO EHHHHHH
- pacing weird
- liked charlie's whole messy arc ➝ well portrayed mental illness
- oml the whole 'i can fix him'
- literally no chemistry
- but an enjoyable read overall (?)
- good points
HJFLHAFSD I DON'T LIKE THE CHARACTERS AND THE PLOT IS SO EHHHHHH
September 1, 2018
Stunningly well written story of marriage and morals in 1950s America. beautiful links with reflection on dying parent in England ("For the first time in her life, all her pairs of glasses were in one place").
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2013
I read this in 2001
March 18, 2023
A measured and cooly calculated novel from master storyteller Sebastian Faulks who delivers a fascinating tale of a damaged, but well-meaning individuals trying to make the right decisions, but seemingly having their interactions head towards some sort of disaster. Intriguingly set against the backdrop of the Nixon/Kennedy US primaries and presidential debate of 1960, it is full of period detail and atmosphere, charting the end of the Eisenhower era. It also throws in elements of FBI intrigue and incidents from the early Indo China conflict but sadly leaves them hanging, returning to the difficulties facing its two lovers.
March 26, 2021
"Find out something new, or little-known and share it with your readers" was Faulks's response to a reader question about the underground war being fought in the trenches of the First World War in Birdsong.
Taking his own advice, he sees to it that I'm now quite clued-up on the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy battle for the White House, the layouts of Washington DC and New York, and the machinations of the UK Foreign Office, the FBI and Soviet close espionage as the Cold War approached its apex at the end of the 1950s.
As ever, this serves as background to Faulks's needle-sharp observation and articulation of personal joys, dilemmas and deeply-buried psychological issues, bound in a wrapper of a love affair played out as a mid-20th century Montague-Capulet tangle, and a conflict between passion and duty, with a bebop and hard bop soundtrack.
Taking his own advice, he sees to it that I'm now quite clued-up on the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy battle for the White House, the layouts of Washington DC and New York, and the machinations of the UK Foreign Office, the FBI and Soviet close espionage as the Cold War approached its apex at the end of the 1950s.
As ever, this serves as background to Faulks's needle-sharp observation and articulation of personal joys, dilemmas and deeply-buried psychological issues, bound in a wrapper of a love affair played out as a mid-20th century Montague-Capulet tangle, and a conflict between passion and duty, with a bebop and hard bop soundtrack.
July 16, 2024
when it was good it was good, when it was bad... well
January 27, 2023
Really underwhelmed compared to the usual Sebastian Faulks books that I’ve loved. The wife of an alcoholic British consular advisor in Washington has an affair with a NY based journalist.
September 16, 2015
I didn't like this book. I really didn't like this book. But I couldn't stop reading it.
I read the first chapter, and thought "this is not my cup of tea". I read another chapter, and thought I can dtop reading it at any time. I don't have to plough my way through it. But I read another chapter anyway.
I don't like this book. I don't like the characters, or the clothes they wear. They are the wrong generation, my parents generation. But still I read. Why? It's 1960, the election campaign in which Kennedy was elected, the first American election I can really remember. I remember wishing that Kennedy would win, because Kennedy was a Roman Catholic and back then I was a High Church Anglican, and High Church Anglicans were second-class Catholics. Kennedy would bring morality and Christian values to American politics, world politics, or so I thought. The Cuban missile crisis put me right on that score. American hypocrisy, and the thought that Krushchev had saved the world from a nuclear holocaust.
1960 was also the year I first heard the name of Jack Kerouac, the year I read The Dharma bums. Jack Kerouac is the same generation as these people, but what a world of difference.
But still I read it, until I eventually reached the end. I think it is well written, but it recalled to me people of my parents' generation, with their business suits and ties and hats and women with hats and gloves and lipstick and high-heeled shoes and well-stocked drinks cabinets. When people visited you had, at the very least, to offer them a choice of brandy, whisky, beer and gin. People of that class did not offer skokiaan and Barberton.
And Faulks describes it all, in excuciating detail -- the clink of ice in glasses, the martinis, the clothes, and all the rest.
No, it is not my kind of book, and these are not my kind of people.
Faulks is even self-mocking, having characters rather disparagingly referring to novels about suburban adultery, like Peyton Place, in the middle of his own novel about suburban adultery.
I didn't like this book, but I read it.
I read the first chapter, and thought "this is not my cup of tea". I read another chapter, and thought I can dtop reading it at any time. I don't have to plough my way through it. But I read another chapter anyway.
I don't like this book. I don't like the characters, or the clothes they wear. They are the wrong generation, my parents generation. But still I read. Why? It's 1960, the election campaign in which Kennedy was elected, the first American election I can really remember. I remember wishing that Kennedy would win, because Kennedy was a Roman Catholic and back then I was a High Church Anglican, and High Church Anglicans were second-class Catholics. Kennedy would bring morality and Christian values to American politics, world politics, or so I thought. The Cuban missile crisis put me right on that score. American hypocrisy, and the thought that Krushchev had saved the world from a nuclear holocaust.
1960 was also the year I first heard the name of Jack Kerouac, the year I read The Dharma bums. Jack Kerouac is the same generation as these people, but what a world of difference.
But still I read it, until I eventually reached the end. I think it is well written, but it recalled to me people of my parents' generation, with their business suits and ties and hats and women with hats and gloves and lipstick and high-heeled shoes and well-stocked drinks cabinets. When people visited you had, at the very least, to offer them a choice of brandy, whisky, beer and gin. People of that class did not offer skokiaan and Barberton.
And Faulks describes it all, in excuciating detail -- the clink of ice in glasses, the martinis, the clothes, and all the rest.
No, it is not my kind of book, and these are not my kind of people.
Faulks is even self-mocking, having characters rather disparagingly referring to novels about suburban adultery, like Peyton Place, in the middle of his own novel about suburban adultery.
I didn't like this book, but I read it.
August 22, 2016
Near the end of this novel, while Mary Van der Linden and Frank Renzo are in a New York City diner wondering whether to continue their affair, Sebastian Faulks describes a man in his thirties with his son, and their awkward behavior suggests an access weekend after a divorce. Mary also thinks of her recently widowed father, back in London. Both of these instances, it occurred to me, could have been written about to make different novels entirely, so easily does Faulks write and research his fiction. For all its qualities, “On Green Dolphin Street” lacks the sense that the central story of Mary, Frank and Mary’s husband, Charlie, is the story that just has to be told. I wouldn’t make this criticism of Faulks’ “Birdsong” or “Enderby”, so compelling is the focus in those novels.
There are some wonderful scenes and descriptions in “On Green Dolphin Street”: Mary entering New York City by train under the Hudson River, a netherworld of sidings disappearing into the dark, empty unless occupied by abandoned railroad machinery; the old Penn Station; Charlie in Saigon in the last days of the French intervention, and sounding, in some respects, like a transplanted New Orleans; the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, which is the immediate backdrop to the personal story with Mary at its centre; the grim Stalinist architecture of the hotel in Moscow from where Mary rescues Charlie; and, most memorably, the death of Mary’s mother. Faulks’ research is mostly sure, though, as a novel about the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the selection of details seems too sure, selected retrospectively by history, rather than by the author. But more noteworthy, as I’ve suggested, is the impression that Faulks could carry on writing with the same assured ease on any or all of these topics. At the end, there is an attempt to bring focus and urgency to the relationship between Mary and the two men, but Faulks has to rely on the device of an imminently departing trans-Atlantic flight.
There are some wonderful scenes and descriptions in “On Green Dolphin Street”: Mary entering New York City by train under the Hudson River, a netherworld of sidings disappearing into the dark, empty unless occupied by abandoned railroad machinery; the old Penn Station; Charlie in Saigon in the last days of the French intervention, and sounding, in some respects, like a transplanted New Orleans; the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, which is the immediate backdrop to the personal story with Mary at its centre; the grim Stalinist architecture of the hotel in Moscow from where Mary rescues Charlie; and, most memorably, the death of Mary’s mother. Faulks’ research is mostly sure, though, as a novel about the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the selection of details seems too sure, selected retrospectively by history, rather than by the author. But more noteworthy, as I’ve suggested, is the impression that Faulks could carry on writing with the same assured ease on any or all of these topics. At the end, there is an attempt to bring focus and urgency to the relationship between Mary and the two men, but Faulks has to rely on the device of an imminently departing trans-Atlantic flight.
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