A Story of Suffering, Passion Lost and Found in 1960 Washington

ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET

A Novel

by Sebastian Faulks

Random House

356 pages, $24.95

Charlie van der Linden is a witty, extroverted Brit diplomat recently transferred to Washington, D.C. He’s fond of Ornette Coleman, Emily Dickinson, casual flings and dry martinis, not necessarily in that order. The year is 1960, party presidential nominations are gathering a full head of steam, and Charlie’s less-than-taxing job is to interpret for superiors the shenanigans of the Yanks. Flanked by his adoring wife, Mary, and their two treasured children, Charlie has a life that is charmed beyond deserving, a journey from function to catered function on a river of whiskey and gin.

One of Charlie’s riffs is to insist that his wife is working on a novel. To the reader, aware that Mary carries hardly a thought in her head beyond love for her family and a sense of life’s grace, this seems unlikely. But halfway into “On Green Dolphin Street,” for reasons of her own, Mary suddenly announces her intent to write a book. A guest asks, “‘Do you like the idea of your wife being an author?’

“‘Sure,’ said Charlie. ‘The new Emily Dickinson. Or Edith Wharton, perhaps.’ He filled his glass. ‘Or Grace Metalious. A ‘Peyton Place’ would do fine. Then I could retire from the service. Then I could retire from the service.’”

“Does she know enough about suburban adultery?”

Mary slips in the answer. “‘I’m sure I could find out, Eddie.’”

One doesn’t associate Sebastian Faulks, author of the bestsellers “Birdsong” and “Charlotte Gray,” with postmodern self-consciousness. But the edginess of the remarks above, in a novel that is precisely and agonizingly about midlife adultery, shows he’s capable of winking at the reader.

Later, Faulks steps in front of the curtain again, this time hinting at an aspect of his purpose through Charlie’s thoughts: ‘ ... the urge that was common to them all [novelists] was a need to improve on the thin texture of life ... to give to existence a pattern, a richness and a value that in actuality it lacked. If after reading such a novel you looked again at life--its unplotted emergencies, narrative non sequiturs and pitiful lack of significance

Though Mary’s project may need more research into the world of adultery, that choice so often perceived by lovers as no choice at all, Faulks’ clearly does not. He knows the territory the way a hawk knows its meadow.

Every twitch is registered; he becomes the lovers. He knows not only the dizzying blissful abyss of the first fall--the insubstantiality of doubt and remorse, the sense of having transgressed one’s nature that is terrible and liberating. He also knows how swiftly and soundlessly a love that appeared rock-solid can vanish, leaving only a husk behind. When the novel opens, Mary sees Charlie as “the fountain of her happiness,” a man who “drank only a little more than most men they knew.” Only a few weeks later she can characterize her husband’s hobbies as “drinking liquor, taking barbiturates and benzedrine tablets, smoking cigarettes and misquoting poetry.” Now there’s an emotional distance traveled.

Mary has met Frank Renzo, a crusading reporter battling his way out of his editor’s doghouse, where he was sent for standing up against Joe McCarthy & Co. once too often. Like friend and rival Charlie, he’s something of a war hero, but otherwise a self-reliant bootstrapper who started from Chicago’s mean streets, lives and breathes New York City, despises Ornette Coleman and reveres Miles Davis. The first time Mary visits his apartment, on the phonograph is Miles playing “Stella by Starlight.” (If you read this book, remember that.) It’s an absorbing, tender scene, as is each of their encounters. In Mary’s later, pleading words: “It’s a miracle, Frank. That we’ve come from so far apart, different worlds ... only I could give you the happiness you deserve.”

“On Green Dolphin Street” inhabits two worlds in another sense. There is the world of Charlie’s suffering and Frank and Mary’s passion, as timeless as the tale of Tristan and Isolde. Then there is the historical world of D.C., 1960, reaching back, for example, into a masterful set scene at Dien Bien Phu and then forward to intimations of the compromised Camelot to come. Englishman Faulks’ fascination with the period is palpable, and his research into contemporary culture and politics nearly impeccable. But the emphasis on superannuated details--prissy women’s clothing, cigarette brands--has a distancing effect, as if one were “watching” a faithful re-creation, rather than (as in Cheever or Updike, say) the actual moment.

Romance? Docudrama? Maybe some third creation: There’s a wrenching turn toward novel’s end, as if the hawk’s tilting wing has shaded the whole meadow dark. A brief misunderstanding cracks open to a canyon of impermanence and loss. Destiny, passion, honor--are these things entirely insubstantial, mere “narrative non sequiturs”? Does Charlie’s inconsolable, bloodshot eye perceive the truth?