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From a writer hailed as an American original -- and the author of the national bestsellers All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing -- comes a taut, expansively imagined drama about four generations of an African American family.
The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken -- or dishonored -- the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling.
- Sales Rank: #344042 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Vintage
- Published on: 1995-08-01
- Released on: 1995-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.19" l, .32 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 144 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Library Journal
It is fitting that Ecco Press, which reissued McCarthy's novels when most of the world was neglecting them, should publish a play that is still in search of a theater. But this story of deep trouble amidst four generations of a black family in Louisville, Kentucky, places McCarthy-arguably America's best living novelist-in the long tradition of novelists who have tried the dramatic form and failed to meet its elusive demands. There are some wonderful scenes, and obvious problems of stagecraft-such as cue lines for a god and impractical sets, including a real stone wall-are nothing a good director can't surmount. But a deeper flaw is that its conflicts are both overly transparent and insufficiently bodied forth in dramatic action. The main character, Ben, is wrong when he tells us that stonemasonry is man's first gift and oldest craft. Those in theater know there is an older one whose secrets are just as long, as hard, and as necessary to master. Recommended for comprehensive literature collections.
Peter Josyph, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
National Book Award-winning novelist McCarthy does something daring for these days. He, white, proffers a play about a black family, a drama devoid of defensive race-consciousness in either himself or his characters. The Telfairs are an old Louisville family who, in the early 1970s, include four generations under one roof. Ben, 32, is the play's central character and, like Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, its explicator (two Bens appear onstage, one engaged in the action, the other at a podium). Ben earlier quit graduate school to follow his grandfather's trade, stonemasonry, which the old man, now 101, still plies. During the play, which proceeds through several deaths, the disappearance of Ben's rebellious teenage nephew, and the disclosure of Ben's father's infidelity as well as a birth and Ben's sister's remarriage, Ben struggles to be the strong center of the family and, Ben-the-narrator makes explicit, to understand the spiritual meanings of his grandfather's life and attachment to his trade. Although it might be more comfortably realized onscreen than onstage, this thoughtful drama is one fine response to the cry for art to be concerned with family values. (See also the May 15 Upfront review of The Crossing, McCarthy's sequel to his All the Pretty Horses. Ray Olson
Review
"McCarthy has achieved something only a few artists even attempt: He has created his own world...and made it his own -- beautiful, nightmarish, isolated." -- Wall Street Journal
Most helpful customer reviews
39 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Thank God for Cormac McCarthy
By A Customer
I don't usually read plays, but I bought this one because, after finishing _Cities of the Plain_, I had read all of Cormac McCarthy's novels and was hungry for more. I was not disappointed. McCarthy's genius is no less evident in _The Stonemason_ than in any of his longer works; if anything, the shorter format of drama allows him to pack even more of his brilliant writing into every page. Many authors are said to have "an ear for dialogue"; McCarthy is the only one I know, of whom this is unquestionably true. Perhaps this explains the effortlessness with which he switches between his usual milieu (novels about white cowboys and outlaws) to the material in this book (a play about black craftsmen). Any more praise I can give to this work, and to McCarthy's other writings, cannot convey the tremendous power -- the sadness and joy - that one experiences in reading them. I only hope he still has some more books left in him.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By V
Excellent!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
"The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice."
By R. M. Peterson
A play, rather than a novel, THE STONEMASON is one of the least known of Cormac McCarthy's works. It also is one of the most positive and least violent of his works (although three of thirteen named characters die during it).
The play spans about four years of the life of the Telfair family in the black section of Louisville, Kentucky in the early 1970s. The patriarch of the family is Papaw, 101 years old, who still works as a stonemason, his trade for ninety years. Both his son, Big Ben, and his grandson, Ben, also work as stonemasons. Ben is the central figure in the staged drama, who tries to hold the family together as the vicissitudes of life and being black in Louisville, Kentucky buffet it about. In addition, a double of Ben periodically delivers a retrospective, philosophical commentary from a podium to the far left of the stage.
The two principal themes of THE STONEMASON have to do with family bonds and with the redemptive quality of honest work well done. Here, that work is freestone masonry. "[T]rue masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God."
For Ben, "that the craft of freemasonry should be allowed to vanish from this world is just not negotiable." So he continues in the trade (even though he was also educated to be a teacher). But to what end? Freestone masonry was a dying craft in 1975, more so in 1995 when the play was written, and yet even more so today. Is Ben's quest quixotic? Is redemption through hard, skilled, honest labor still possible? And, to allude to the line that I have used as the title for this review, does that long arc of the moral universe truly bend toward justice? THE STONEMASON itself does not provide an unequivocal "Yes". The play may ultimately be positive in outlook, but it requires an element of faith.
It is a restrained, quiet play, with just enough drama or suspense to sustain it. The story is certainly adequate. Stronger than the story, though, are four of the play's characters - Papaw, Ben, Ben's mother, and his wife Maven - each of whom is the proverbial salt of the earth and imbued with wisdom and grace. And if there is hope for the human endeavor, to my mind it lies in people like those four, rather than in the quasi-religious mysteries of stonemasonry and other such crafts.
I have some doubts whether the play could successfully be staged. (I would be interested in learning whether it indeed has been staged and what the response was.) It contains elaborate stage directions and some rapid shifts between very short scenes with quite different stage settings. It feels a little like a novella that somewhere in the process of creation was shoehorned into the format of a stage play. There are numerous passages exploring deep metaphysical or mythical mysteries that are typical of McCarthy - but they seem more appropriate to being read from the page than heard from the stage. On the other hand, the play is packed, from beginning to end, with strong, pitch-perfect dialogue, that should be just as pleasurable to hear from actors as it is to read.
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