The Stonemason: A Play In Five Acts [Hardcover]

Cormac McCarthy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1994

The Stonemason is a profoundly moving drama set in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1970s, concerning several generations of a black family. McCarthy's narrator, Ben, reveals a painful episode in his family's history, grounding us at the same time in the beautiful dynamic between him and his grandfather, Papaw. Ben, Ben's father, and Papaw are all stonemasons, but in descriptions of "the trade" we learn as much about this family's capacity for love as we do about constructing sound foundations for houses, barns and bridges.

Papaw's knowledge about stonemasonry is analogous to his deep spiritual wisdom, and Ben recognizes both as he looks back on his apprenticeship in the "trade at which I thought myself a master and of which I stood in darkest ignorance. And as I came to know him ... As I came to know him ... Oh I could hardly believe my good fortune. I swore then I'd cleave to that old man like a bride. I swore he'd take nothing to his grave."

Papaw's son Big Ben and great-grandson Soldier do not respond as whole-heartedly to the old man's wealth of knowledge and patient guidance and the tragedy of the story is largely rooted in this fact. Both of these characters have lost connection with the work of their hands and by association with the earth, their family, and themselves. They are profoundly dissatisfied. Of his father, Ben later wonders, "Why could he not see the worth of that which he had laid aside and the poverty of all he hungered for? Why could he not see that he too was blest?"

The Stonemason reveals afresh the mastery of character, plot, pathos, and the poetic facility for language that distinguishes Cormac McCarthy's fiction, and which recently earned him the National Book Award for his bestselling novel, All The Pretty Horses.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 146 pages
• Publisher: Ecco Press; 1st edition (April 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880013591
• ISBN-13: 978-0880013598
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #865,864 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.

Photo © Derek Shapton

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Faulkner pales, May 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts (Paperback)

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.

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank God for Cormac McCarthy, June 23, 1998

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Stonemason: A Play In Five Acts (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Good Play, February 3, 2010

By 

Mikel M. Rowley "Mike R" (union, or United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts (Paperback)

As a teacher of English, I am always looking for new and contemporary stuff. This play fits the bill nicely. Cormac McCaarthy is one of my favorite authors and does not disappoint here. Very well done.