The
U-2 incident. The Kennedy-Nixon debates. Smoky Greenwich Village
bars and cool jazz (the book's title comes from a Miles Davis
album). Do those seem like ancient history? Not to me. There's
history --- and then there is History. The former is the kind you
lived through; the latter happened before you were born. So it was
a shock to realize that ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET, which opens in
1959, when I was 14, is a legitimate historical novel and it is
tempting to be especially picky about the way Sebastian Faulks, an
Englishman, goes about authenticating a period I think of as my
private property.

The story centers on Charlie van der Linden, a diplomat assigned to
the British embassy in Washington, D.C. and his wife, Mary. Around
them swirls a Cold War aura of suspicion and a giddy Eisenhower-era
enthusiasm for big cars, family values and lots of scotch. It's an
uneasy mix that becomes even less stable when Frank Renzo, an
American newspaper reporter, shows up at one of the van der
Lindens' parties. Not only do he and Mary start an affair, but he
and Charlie are, in a way, on parallel tracks: both have troubling
memories of World War II and both were at Dien Bien Phu, the last
stand of defeated French colonialism in Vietnam. But Charlie is
visibly self-destructing: he drinks his life away ("He barely had
hangovers anymore, just days of gastric terror and mental absence")
and his outlook is suicidally bleak. Frank, though temporarily
blackballed for suspect liberal sympathies, is fighting his way
back to journalistic legitimacy; covering the presidential campaign
is his big chance. He is based in New York and the two cities are
an interesting contrast: the pristine surfaces of Washington, the
down-and-dirty vitality of Manhattan.

The '50s and early '60s are trendy these days, what with
Oscar-nominated movies like Far From Heaven and The Hours. And, as
in the careful, self-conscious art direction of these films --- the
vintage car rolling slowly across the screen --- the period details
in ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET at first seem intrusive. We are regaled
with descriptions of food (including "Salteen" crackers) and
clothing (ads for Triumph Foundation Garments). An entire page is
given over to Pennsylvania Station, which was torn down in a
passion of urban renewal before New York awoke to the glories of
older architecture. There are some heavy-handedly ironic winks and
nudges, too, as when Frank thinks "the panic over the identity of
the potential vice-president was morbid when Kennedy himself was so
young" or he remarks of Vietnam, "We never could get American
readers interested in that place."

Fortunately, the characters soon take over. Although Frank and
Charlie have an attractive, Graham Greene-esque world-weariness and
Mary seems initially to be one of those women trapped in
housewifery, consumerism and motherhood (the very model for Betty
Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE), she turns out to be the most
interesting of the three. Self-observing, imaginative and
intelligent, she is nearly overwhelmed by the burdens of family
love (the passages concerning her mother's death are among the
strongest in the book) and the cold facts of mortality: "Only
people in their wretched middle age had to face the truth, Mary
thought; the slipped responsibilities of the old and young were
hers alone to bear." At the same time, she is dazzled by the
passion she feels for Frank, a love that seems to exist outside of
time (an illusion sustained by the fact that the liaison is
conducted almost entirely in New York) and drawn to the freedom he
represents. Whether she will seize her opportunity for escape is a
question that remains open to the very end of ON GREEN DOLPHIN
STREET.

The convergence of love and war (in this case more cold than hot)
is familiar territory for Faulks, whose brilliant World War II
trilogy (THE GIRL AT THE LION D'OR, BIRDSONG, CHARLOTTE GRAY)
combines a powerful romantic streak with details of crushing
realism, a sense of destiny with a sense of futility. Mary and
Frank's relationship is a given, like a hurricane or tidal wave; it
doesn't seem to suffer from the slings and arrows that ordinary
lovers are constantly ducking. Yet for Mary it also represents a
rediscovery of herself --- something she thought she'd lost forever
with the death of her first sweetheart, David, in the war --- and
in her moral conflict and emotional daring, she emerges as a woman
of tremendous complexity and heart.

As the personal story gathers momentum, the political context seems
to lose some of its stage-set stiffness. Faulks's account of the
campaign, debate and election night is genuinely thrilling, even
though we know how it will come out. The scenes at Dien Bien Phu
prefigure the war that nobody wanted and the flashbacks to World
War II recall the savagery of the war that everybody seems to agree
was necessary. There is a cosmic sadness to these events, as if
Faulks and his melancholy heroes are grieving in advance for
greater troubles to come.

Frank and Charlie monopolize the politics; Mary relates to the
wider world almost exclusively through the two men. While that may
be accurate in terms of the role women were expected to play 40
years ago, it splits the book down the middle: Faulks never quite
manages to fuse his story of love and personal transformation with
the currents of social change. Nonetheless, ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET
is an absorbing, sometimes transporting novel. Once I got off my "I
was there" high horse, I realized that it captures much of the pace
and music and swelling bohemianism of New York when I was young, as
well as the mood of expectation that swept us: the country holding
its breath, wondering what would happen next.