Thank God for Cormac McCarthy

books:


	• The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts Cormac Mccarthy Vintage, 1995 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Faulkner pales

This is one of the finest books I've ever read. I've heard McCarthy compared with William Faulkner, and perhaps without Faulkner, we wouldn't have McCarthy. But, nowhere in Faulkner, or any other writer, have I encountered such fearless and unencumbered writing; such clarity. It is barely noticable that it's written in play form. Ancient and completely familiar; the writing is just like the simplicity, weight and gravity of the stone he describes.

Thank God for Cormac McCarthy

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.

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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.

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