Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sponsored by Oil Heiress Rebekah Harkness, a longtime ballet buff, the company offers ensemble work of high sheen, which is now expected on the American scene, along with dynamic soloistic virtuosity, which is not. Of the 18 works in its repertory only one (a restaging by Director Brian Macdonald of The Firebird) ranks as a classic standby. The other 17 range from abstract studies in pure motion to dance translations of contemporary headlines. In Stuart Hodes' Abyss, a pair of fragile lovers are attacked by three hoodlums; Rudi van Dantzig's Monument for a Dead Boy poignantly traces...
DiCara is being assisted in the drive by MacDonald Barr, assistant to the director of the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies...
...final chapters of Find a Victim and The Far Side of the Dollar this pang of identification is the germ of scenes of high domestic tragedy, moments without analogy in any recent writing. If MacDonald can be said to have any thematic obsession (and high art and obsession have been known to keep close company) it is the family: its tensions, its distorting cruelty, and its strange dignity. In each of these long concluding sequences Archer, and through him the reader, must witness at length the inexorable working-out of old guilts and old loves...
...reader could ask no better intermediary. It is the character of Archer itself which is the finest of MacDonald's accomplishments. Isolated, guilty, constantly compromised by the nature of his work and the demands of personal and professional survival, he labors not to change a world or any corner of it, but to preserve something of his own integrity and decency. Lew Archer is a natural successor to Hammett's jaded Continental Op and Chandler's cynical knight-errant, Philip Marlowe, but his problems and solutions are far closer to us and the business of living...
...little too easy to speak of literary art transcending genre Hamlet remains a revenge play, the greatest novel in English begins and ends as an American sea story, and transcendence is only a poor and pompous synonym for quality. Ross MacDonald has taken from the great tradition of crime fiction as much as he has given to it. He has enriched and expanded this tradition, but he has never abandoned or violated it. Like so many of the best American authors, he has produced a body of work in a genre style which meets the most severe standards of substance...