Jay Parini
On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson)
Sebastian Faulks has become an international sensation, attracting countless readers to his entertaining French trio, The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. Now, with a surprising shift of scene, comes On Green Dolphin Street.
Rather as you do with a decent television drama, I turned happily enough to the book every night for several days, wondering what would happen next. My hunch is that this is where the secret of Faulks’s success with readers lies: he makes one interested in his characters and their fates, however stereotyped. He does this by dwelling on their vulnerabilities, while hinting at their secret strengths. There is a powerful tendency to identify with such characters, as all gifted storytellers know.
On Green Dolphin Street rises several steps above the cheap romance novel, althought the plot would be familiar to devotees of that genre: a bored housewife, married to a charming but neurotic drunk, with two lovely children, falls for a divorced newspaper reporter. She has a surreptitious affair with him, hiding her activities more or less successfully until the end. The husband cracks up from drink and depression.
Out of pity more than love, she goes back to him, sacrificing her new-found happiness because, well, she must. It’s the right thing to do.
There is more, of course, and that’s where Faulks lays claim to being a genuinely interesting writer. As he showed in Birdsong, he can summon a particular time and place with considerable skill, deftly relating individual stories to a broader historical scene. Although he often relies on period clichs, he understands their power and milks the drama in them for what it is worth.
On Green Dolphin Street is another attempt to call forth a period in history and a special place. As the novel opens it is 1959 in Washington DC. Charlie van der Linden is a British diplomat, an expert in United States politics with supposedly close ties to the Kennedy entourage. (The presidential primaries and the election campaign form a backdrop to the novel’s progress, culminating in the television debate between the candidates.) The heroine is Mary van der Linden, a model diplomatic wife who reluctantly packs her children off to boarding schools in Britain. Charlie is a high-flyer in the diplomatic corps who enjoys making up fake quotations from Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson; he also smokes and drinks with suicidal abandon. Frank Renzo, who becomes Mary’s lover, is described as a “tall, lean man, his cropped hair showing the first dust of grey; his accent was from the urban Midwest”. I’m an American, married to a woman from the urban Midwest, but I would not recognise such an accent.
Mary is nicely drawn, and the flashbacks to her first affair during the war with a man later killed in action are memorable. Charlie, whose alcoholism is wrenchingly dramatised, lingers in the mind as a vivid character. The problem comes with the portrait of the US and Americans. I found myself so distracted by minor errors that my involvement in the plot was frequently interrupted. For example, Charlie is often seen gulping Tylenols to soothe a hangover, though Tylenols didn’t exist then. Faulks appears to believe that John Kennedy went to law school (as did his brothers, Robert and Ted) and that the man who moderated the Nixon-Kennedy debate was called Howard Smith, when as every American knows he was always referred to as Howard K Smith. (I’m not being petty: to call him Howard Smith is like referring to FDR as FR.)
Faulks has an unfortunate tendency to rely on stereotypes to evoke an US scene. One example will suffice. Frank Renzo has supposedly been demoted at his newspaper for his coverage of a racist killing in Mississippi. Faulks writes: “Frank noticed that almost all the local men seemed to be armed. Old boys in straw hats sitting on the verandah had shotguns across their knees; twin barrels poked from farm debris in the back of a pick-up truck; even in the grey brick courthouse, he saw more than one pearl handle sticking out from a straining waistband.”
What’s wrong with this scene? For a start it relies on every hackneyed image one could imagine. The “old boys” are not, as British readers might guess, Old Etonians. They are “good old boys”. The pearl handles in the courthouse seem better suited to a Western than Southern film.
Nor will US readers swallow many of the attempts at reproducing American vernacular, as when Charlie asks a couple of Americans what they are drinking, and they reply, “Martini”, when they would say, “Martinis”. This is small stuff, but novels are made of small stuff like this. Faulks obviously needs to spend more time watching US television shows.
On the other hand I often found myself writing “good!” in the margins, as when Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, dies at home, and she and her father go into the sitting room. “They talked with a candour induced by the knowledge that there was nothing left to conceal; they remembered what Elizabeth had been like, what they had loved about her and what they had never understood, the mysterious motivations, the corrugations of her individual temperament. For long periods they were quiet, exhausted, but with a sense that something had happened in its proper place; they were made silent by awe.”
In moments such as this Faulks does justice to his real talents, lifting the narrative into fresher, headier air.
Nobody will mistake On Green Dolphin Street for a work of art, but Mary’s internal conflicts, in all their drab ordinariness, are tenderly embodied, and Charlie’s existential despair, which alcohol amplifies, is movingly rendered. Frank remains cardboard-thin, and I never understood what Mary saw in him.
Though entertained, I trawled these pages for those moments of fine perception that make Faulks worth reading. Unfortunately they were few and far between.