A review by siria
On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks

3.0

On Green Dolphin Street began strongly, with all the sense of period and the kind of photographic impressionism which marks Faulks' writing at its best. He is very good at capturing a sense of the time and place in which the van der Lindens were living—Washington and New York and London in the heady days of Kennedy's race for the White House, a world of embassy parties and diplomatic intrigues and beat poets—as well as sketching out the kinds of people which they were. And yet as the novel progressed, I found it all rather... well, uninspired, I suppose, a little novel-by-numbers, which impression was not weakened by the ending. The last third of the book felt as if it tipped over more and more into a weak melodrama; some of the dialogue which he put into Mary's mouth, in particular, made me raise my eyebrows. Not Faulks' best.