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.

The plot is simple: Mary, a British diplomat's wife living in Washington D.C., enters into an affair with Frank, a newspaper reporter covering the 1960 presidential campaign. Yet in Faulks' skillful hands, the story is anything but simple. We see in Mary a complex woman: a dutiful mother, wife and daughter torn between the residual love she feels for her husband (a man tortured by his war experience and disappointments of his career) and the passion she feels for her lover, also a war veteran but one who has mostly come to terms with his painful experience. The tale is told against the backdrop of the politics of the day and the stylish milieu of New York City and Washington on the cusp of the sweeping changes to come in the Sixties. Even though the affair between Mary and Frank takes its time to develop, we savor it all the more for its inevitability and its truth. There are clearly no easy answers here. We wonder what we would have done under similar circumstances. It is a testament to Faulks' genius that we sympathize with each of his three main characters.

I really wanted to love this book more than I did - parts were fascinating (the Cold War diplomacy and Nixon/Kennedy campaign context) but the protagonist was cold and dull so became a chore to finish - the affair which was supposed to be the torrid centrepiece was even more cold and dull. Never mind - at least he wrote the masterpiece that is Birdsong to make up for this.

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.

This is a slow burn rather than fast paced. It is very character driven focusing on a British Diplomats wife who falls in love with an American journalist. She has a choice as to whether to stay with her depressed alcoholic husband and their children or leave them for her soulmate. Initially I found it slow going and the backdrop of the presidential election between Kennedy and Nixon seemed irrelevant along with the war stories of both Charlie and Frank. A somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion.

This 2001 novel from one of my favourite contemporary English writers, is almost the perfect expression of what I read modern novels to enjoy: this gem, a story of a sensitive woman's continuous struggles with the trials & tribulations of those other souls that she has loved & lost...or is about to!...and how she deals with the inevitable sacrifices that she has to make to survive and to retain her self-respect and integrity in an unforgiving world of imminent nuclear oblivion.
Mary van der Linden, the main protagonist, is comfortably married to Charlie, an English diplomat based in Washington (the one in America!) with her two, young children at the time of the 1960 Presidential election, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeats vice-president under Eisenhower, Richard Milhouse Nixon in a topsy-turvy process of typically American political shenanigans, begorrah!
Mary falls for Frank Renzo, a roving, unsettled journalist who has come through his hardest years during the last war with his integrity intact. though his psyche is much troubled; and it is this relationship, as he falls equally for Mary, that is the focus of Faulk's brilliant writing. He skilfully blends in the real events - a recollection by Charlie of the French debacle at Dien Bin Phu is memorably graphic - with the developing story of the 'love triangle'...as Mary's mother suffers with cancer, her precious children are sent away to school in England & her husband's health problems begin to alter her growing perspectives of the passion she feels for the misfit Frank, who dazzles her with his strange individuality & intensity.
For 340 pages I was engrossed, entertained & enlightened - this is Sebastian Faulk's literary style at its best. I heartily recommend this exceptional example of a great writer's breadth, depth & quality. And there are others...

Well written book about a sad love affair during the 60's.

Sebastian Faulks' On Green Dolphin Street is set during the time around the era leading up to the Nixon/Kennedy campaign. A British woman married to a British diplomat is having an affair with an American journalist and they go on walking tours all through New York while the guy is telling her tales of the city. And of course they go to jazz clubs as one would guess from the title. But what grabbed me were characters talking about Joe McCarthy and his accusations of Communism against leading people all over the nation. Joe McCarthy with "his Roy Cohn," who was of course the real Roy Cohn.

Sadly this book kept me waiting for something to happen! I guess if you read it for a book group you could spend quite a bit of time discussing the various relationships as that is a key topic for this book. However in terms of a story line and wanting to know what happens, I struggled to maintain interest.

I really enjoyed the writing style of this book. The character development was really interesting. The only part that I did not enjoy was the political side. It is just not my style.
However, this book deserves a rating of 4 stars...it was very well written.

What an appallingly dreadful book. Thank goodness I only paid $3 for it from the Strand Bookstore's 2nd hand shelves - and even then it wasn't worth what I paid for it. The 2 stars is for portraying the 1960s well. Landlines only, women in cocktail dresses and hats, drinks parties, martinis at lunch etc, etc. It is also well written with good vocabulary and grammar. Those things aside it is unrealistic and in many cases just plain bad. Perhaps a trite romance is not my style... (Purchased at the Strand Bookstore, NYC)

There is a tell tale passage on page 195 where Sebastian Faulks sums up Charlie's disillusion with life. The authors he loved as a teenager now seem involved in a "heavy task: from people they met, they gathered characteristics for their imaginary humans; from conversations, they pulled out thoughts that could be developed into themes; houses they had visited were refurnished; other writers were absorbed..." The one thing Charlie can no longer find is inspiration. While this is an absorbing, entertaining, and engaging read, and while there are occasional passages of brilliance, its plot is hackneyed, and its imaginary humans are second-rate. It lacks the inspiration of his wartime novels.