On Green Dolphin Street was published by Hutchinson in 2001. The title comes from a jazz standard (Miles Davis’s version is referenced throughout) — and jazz provides the novel’s emotional register: improvisation within form, the beauty of controlled abandon, the way a melody can contain both joy and sorrow simultaneously.
Mary van der Linden is an Englishwoman married to Charlie, a British diplomat posted to Washington and then New York in 1959–1960. Their marriage is stable, affectionate, and emotionally insufficient: Charlie is kind but incurious about her inner life, and Mary has accepted this limitation as the price of security. Then she meets Frank Renzo, an American newspaper journalist — warm, direct, emotionally available in ways that English men are not — and begins an affair that forces her to choose between the safety of her marriage and the intensity of genuine connection.
Faulks sets this private drama against the public excitement of 1960: the Kennedy campaign (Camelot before Camelot, when everything seemed possible), the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village, the last innocent moment of American optimism before assassination and Vietnam destroyed it. The parallel is deliberate: Mary’s choice between Charlie and Frank is also a choice between England and America, between restraint and expression, between the old world and the new.
The novel is slighter than Birdsong or Human Traces — deliberately so: it operates on the scale of personal emotion rather than historical catastrophe. But within that smaller scale, Faulks achieves moments of genuine insight into the emotional architecture of adultery: the guilt, the excitement, the terrible clarity that comes from seeing your ordinary life from outside it.
Collecting On Green Dolphin Street
First edition (Hutchinson, London, 2001): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed first edition: $30–$75
- Without jacket: $5–$10
A quieter Faulks novel, valued by readers who appreciate his prose style applied to intimate rather than epic material.