Cormac McCarthy, who was born in 1933 and has been publishing novels since 1965, was until only two years ago an obscure name to the larger reading public, burdened with a reputation as a writer's writer. McCarthy's dark and violent fictions, set in the American South and Southwest and redolent of earlier times and more primitive ways, were almost equally praised for their lyrical force and damned for their relentless pessimism.

Then came All the Pretty Horses, a resonant tale of initiation set in southwestern Texas and Mexico, which won both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award and was accorded virtually unanimous nationwide and international acclaim. No longer was McCarthy the property of the cognoscenti, although he has maintained his taciturn separation from the literary establishment.

McCarthy is currently represented by two new books: The Crossing, the middle novel in his "Border Trilogy" (of which All the Pretty Horses was Volume 1), and The Stonemason, a full-length play, originally written more than 15 years ago, since revised and thus far unproduced.

Part spoken reverie and part dramatic action, The Stonemason portrays a black family, the Telfairs of Louisville, through the eyes of Ben Telfair. A former schoolteacher, Ben has turned from that vocation to the path followed by his beloved grandfather ("Papaw"), who has remained throughout his long life (of 102 years) devoted to the craft in which his grandson perceives a sustaining moral example—and from which the succeeding Telfair generations have drifted away into financial collapse, infidelity, drug abuse and suicide.

Expertly constructed and limpidly written, the play offers several incisive brief characterizations, and it triumphs in its presentation of Papaw, whose earthy wisdom McCarthy makes altogether credible. (Papaw is undoubtedly modeled on the ageless Indian guide Sam Fathers of Faulkner's novella The Bear.)

Ben Telfair is a mouthpiece, and his solemn celebration of the workingman's ethos provokes the other Telfairs ("You think his opinions are valuable because he's worked all his life. Isn't that a pretty romantic notion?") and occasionally lapses into sententiousness. But McCarthy has set traps and springs them remorselessly. Ben's adherence to the ideal of stonemasonry leads him to misunderstand and unintentionally betray others who deserve his devotion ("I've questioned the rightness of loving that old man beyond all other souls," he ruefully concludes), and he contributes his own share to the destruction of the family he has labored to save.

Like all McCarthy's work, The Stonemason is a mixture of vividly rendered conflict and complex discursive commentary. Compared to his novels, it's minor work but seems to this reader both skillfully fashioned and eminently playable. One hopes that McCarthy's current high reputation will encourage somebody to stage it.

The Crossing, which surely will enhance that reputation, contains numerous echoes of All the Pretty Horses, though its characters, plot and setting are new. Once again we are thrust into a barren landscape in which man and animals alike labor to comprehend and survive a universe that is at best indifferent, at worst charged with a phlegmatic menace.

The setting is southwestern New Mexico and Mexico in the three years just before, then after America's entry into World War II. In the first of the novel's four long segments, Billy and Boyd Parham, aged 16 and 14, help their father track a marauding she-wolf—an almost unheard-of anachronism in their relatively peaceful cattle-ranching corner of the world.

Discovering the wolf caught in their trap and acting on a bone-deep impulse he only half understands, Billy carries the wounded animal across the border into Mexico, pledged to return it to the mountains whence it came. But his mission is thwarted, and Billy does what he must to salvage the integrity of the creature.

In part two, after long weeks away and perhaps heeding the admonition of a traveling stranger who urges him to "cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world," Billy returns home—to a scene of devastation and loss, and reunion with the younger brother for whom he now declares himself responsible. Another journey ensues: this one in search of justice, if not revenge. There are more "crossings" and an encounter with a wandering adolescent girl, who joins them.

Part three focuses on the boys' efforts to recover horses stolen from them. A violent confrontation sows the seeds of later, more grievous trouble. Billy loses Boyd, finds him, then loses him again.

Part four finds Billy alone, trying to enlist in the army but being rejected when he's diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat. He drifts from one temporary job and unwelcoming place to another, never at peace ("the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it"), daring danger, courting death. Finally, learning of his brother's whereabouts, Billy manages, against overpowering odds, to reclaim him—although he remains thereafter rootless and purposeless, seeking some kind of connection that he seems perpetually fated to lose or drive away.

This powerful story is captured in imagery of great beauty and precision. The metaphor of crossing, for instance, perfectly encapsulates both the maze-like rites of passage the Parham boys endure and their restless, prickly inability to settle or belong.

The sonorous density of McCarthy's Faulkner-derived prose is seen at its best in his eerie presentation of the captive wolf (whose "eyes burned … like gatelamps to another world"), and in dozens of breathtakingly imaginative descriptive passages (for example: "the thin horned moon lay on its back in the west like a grail and the bright shape of Venus hung directly above it like a star falling into a boat").

McCarthy is a matchless describer of processes (preparing, and setting wolftraps, cauterizing a bullet wound, etc.), and a superbly visual writer whose images are truly seen (a boy dressing at night "held [his] boots to the window-light to pair them left and right"; a rider having dismounted "stood down into the snow and dropped the reins and squatted and thumbed back the brim of his hat").

He pays his readers the compliment of rendering much of the novel's dialogue in untranslated Spanish (we're thus forced to pay close attention, and can almost always understand the sense, if not every word, of such conversations).

What McCarthy says of a tribe of nomadic Indians—that "their reticence and their silence bespoke a view of a world provisional, contingent, deeply suspect"—might apply to all this novel's characters. Yet he enters fully into the heart and mind of Billy Parham and makes believable and moving his helpless love for all he cannot but lose.

This novel's intricate view of human travail embraces both blunt fatalism ("death is the truth") and the stoical conviction that we do not, after all, wander in a meaningless void. ("Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.")

The Crossing abounds with action that some will declare melodramatic, and there's no question that McCarthy lets the brothers encounter a few too many mysterious strangers possessed of numbingly gnomic wisdom. Oppressive literary echoes include not just McCarthy's homage to Faulkner but also awkwardly re-imagined simulacra of the opening of Great Expectations and the Father Zossima passages of The Brothers Karamazov.

But these are only blemishes. On balance, this ambitious novel offers a masterly display of tonal control and some of the most pitch-perfect rapturous prose being written these days. The opening section, focused on the dramatic symbiosis between captured animal and emergent boy-man, is a magnificent piece of writing, in every way comparable to the best of Melville as well as Faulkner.

There's enough going on in this brilliantly imagined book to lure a reader into racing eagerly through its pages. But don't skim. You won't want to miss a single sentence.