Word: counterpoint
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Higgins writes conversation better than he does anything else.. Descriptive sections of Eddie Coyle still his best book, could never stun readers the way the dialogue does. Even at its most clumsy Higgins's descriptive prose still serves as respite and counterpoint, amplifying the impact of his characters' talk. In his last two-books, on the other hand, there are few pages with anything but dialogue. Even indirect quotation is entirely abandoned: a clear sentence like the one beginning Eddie Coyle ("Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns...
...TIME editors and correspondents. In ten Arab capitals, the TIME-sponsored news tour repeatedly heard this message: the U.S., because of its contacts with Israel, must play the key role as Middle East peacemaker. The Arabs also emphasized that they are anxious for closer ties to the U.S. to counterpoint Washington's special relationship with Israel. Nor were they at all hesitant to lecture their visitors on what they perceive as shortcomings in U.S. foreign policy...
Granted, all these are difficult tasks, which some would claim lie outside the realm of journalism. We don't expect certainty from sociologists looking backwards, much less journalists trying to augur the future. Notwithstanding, the Editors pretend to even more exaggerated heights of hortatory hyperbole, theorizing about "journalistic counterpoint," and dreaming of historians of the twenty-first century leafing through yellowing newsprint searching for these poignant vignettes that will crystallize the sixties and seventies...
...oranges and step up into their carriage. Best of all, the Orient Express itself billows out steam that becomes a cloud of suspicion and hidden motives; it pulls out of the station like a great ocean liner out of port, its wheels grinding out screams that are the counterpoint to murder and conspiracy. Finally, the Express stops dead in the middle of a Yugoslavian blizzard that turns the entire screen white for just a moment. The train is utterly isolated, one of those Agatha Christie devices--like the island cut off from civilization in And Then There Were None...
...until the audience realizes that this is a fantasy of wish fulfillment. The Millers are the family O'Neill would have preferred to those refugees from the House of Atreus with whom he was actually saddled. Throughout the play there are wood-notes of despair that provide a counterpoint, hinting that the Millers have within them the same talent for self-destruction as the Tyrones of O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night. With bad luck, comforting Mother Essie might become junkie Mary Tyrone; responsible Father Nat could turn into drunken James. These...