Word: macdonald
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...Sleeping Beauty, Macdonald...
...Macdonald's work, as in Dickens', we delight in finding that all the various characters are intermeshed in a network that stretches across space and time. From Dickens' novels, the reader inferred the existence of an all-encompassing, interdependent organic society, a world where no man lived alone. It was a nice assumption. The horse and buggy and the nickel beer were also nice...
...Macdonald's intricate structures reflect a different submerged truth. In the bizarre environs of Southern California, only surfaces have reality: so textures, colors and, most important, patterns, take on a new significance. Every self-respecting locale and era has its poet. Just as Proust captured the spirit of modern French bourgeois life, just as Richard Wright conveyed the black lifestyle to his white readers, just as Scott Fitzgerald and the Roaring Twenties have become synonomous, so the work of Ross Macdonald is Southern California: dazzling, superficial, gaudy, colorful, combining desire with revulsion, beauty with horror, excitement with monotony...
Monotony is a charge sometimes leveled against Macdonald. To be honest, his books do share a striking similarity on the surface. Virtually all of them begin with a kidnapping or blackmailing which, it later develops, is intimately related to a murder that occurred about a quarter of a century ago. That murder was, as likely as not, witnessed by a small child, who has grown up to become a central figure in the new crime. And all of these events occur in the overripe city of Los Angeles or in the dusty, hot, neighboring Southern California towns...
Because anyone who doesn't enjoy Ross Macdonald cannot appreciate Southern California, which as everyone knows, is the true heart and guts of America, the future of the world. It would be un- American not to like Ross Macdonald and not to love Sleeping Beauty, one of his best books yet. No, it would be more than un-American. It would be unforgivable. And impossible...