Rescorla Book Club
We don't have a date for our next meeting yet, but it will be in the new year. Watch this space for details!
Book Club Newsletter
July 24
Lovely to see everyone again!
We had another lively and interesting discussion about the book ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ by Sebastian Faulks. Some of us enjoyed the book more than others. We had mixed views about the characters and their motivations. We felt the book was very well written and captured the era very well. We discussed how the story took place over the course of one year, and we were left to speculate about what would happen next – a variety of opinions on that were expressed!
Here’s a review of the book:
Tourist tale
Sebastian Faulks goes to the US in On Green Dolphin Street, but he can't do the lingo, says Jay Parini
Sat 28 Apr 2001
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 . The last - which details the adventures in France of Faulks's eponymous heroine, Miss Gray, during the second world war - will soon be a film, directed by Gillian Armstrong. This adaptation may propel the novel itself to the level of Birdsong , which can only be called a phenomenon. Now, with a surprising shift of novelistic scene, comes On Green Dolphin Street , set mostly in the United States in 1959.
It is not wonderful, though I found the story oddly compelling at certain points. 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 - especially those who focus on genre fiction.
On Green Dolphin Street rises several steps above the cheap romance novel. The plot, certainly, 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 rather triumphantly 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 clichés -as when evoking life in the muddy trenches of the first world war - he understands their power and milks the drama in them for what it is worth. His flashes forward to the 1970s in Birdsong seemed pale and tedious by comparison, and one longed to get back to the trenches.
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. Charlie van der Linden is a British diplomat, an expert in American 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 famous television debate between the candidates.) The novel's heroine is Mary van der Linden, a model diplomatic wife who reluctantly packs off her children to boarding schools in Britain. Her husband 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 love 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. Mary's dying mother and grieving father in London are movingly portrayed, too. The problem comes with the novelist's portrait of America and Americans. I found myself so distracted by minor errors that my involvement in the plot was frequently interrupted, and I began to doubt that any of the details were right. For example, Charlie is often seen gulping Tylenols to soothe a hangover, though anyone who lived through that era knows that 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 - this famous television presenter 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.) I could multiply examples, but won't bother.
Faulks has an unfortunate tendency to rely on stereotypes to evoke an American scene. One example will suffice: Frank Renzo has supposedly been demoted at his newspaper for his coverage of a racist killing in Mississippi - the Emmett Till case, which is well known. In setting the scene, Faulks writes: "Frank noticed that almost all the local men seemed to be armed. Old boys in stray 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.
Suffice it to say, no American reader will find this scene anything but parodic. Nor will they 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 American television shows.
On the other hand, I frequently 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 to remember her. "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." It is in moments like this that 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, while Charlie's existential despair, which alcohol amplifies more than soothes, is movingly rendered. Frank remains cardboard-thin beside the van der Lindens, and I never understood what Mary saw in him. Though entertained, I trolled these pages for those moments of extremely fine perception that make Faulks worth reading. Unfortunately, they were few and far between.
Hope you all have a lovely summer.
Happy reading,
Tracy.
