Rating: 
Summary: A mellow masterpiece
Review: There is no longer any point in being defensive about Pynchon. I personally don't have any doubt that, on the strengths of "Gravity's Rainbow" and to a slightly lesser extent "The Crying of Lot 49", he is the greatest living novelist working in the English language, for what that's worth. These books are no more demanding than the average Jacobean tragedy. Which, really, isn't very much.The rewards of Pynchon have always outweighed the difficulties, anyway. "Mason & Dixon" is perhaps the foundling child of the rumour, current in the 80s, that Pynchon was writing a novel about the Civil War. He ended up giving us "Vineland", his frothiest work, which isn't to say that it's not haunted by malevolent spectres of Nixon and Reagan. "Mason & Dixon" probably demands some vague acquaintance with 18th century fiction, in order to see what Pynchon is getting at stylistically, but really, guys, they're on the shelf at bargain prices, and if you haven't read 'em by now ... Gawd help you. I use the word "mellow" because this seems to me to be a sadder and more tolerant Pynchon at work. (It may only seem that way cause he's older, and we expect this kind of thing from a Late Style, but nevertheless...I'll get back to you on it when I've read it again.) He manages to combine a mischievous sense of the contemporary with a feel for the America-before-America that seems somehow right, even if I don't know how. A good example is the episode where the stuffy Mason and the goofy Dixon pay a call on Colonel George Washington, who happens to be smoking a pipe filled with some substance or other; the three of them promptly get the munchies, and call upon the servants for some eats. Or the bit when a blue-bespectacled Benjamin Franklin plays a glass harmonica in a chophouse, thereby presaging the phenomenon of the DJ. Or the scene where the pizza is invented. And so on. What's surprising and new about the book is Pynchon's (apparent) uncomplicated fondness for his two heroes. Mason, pious, middle-class, respectable and socially ambitious - southern English to a T - is forever being embarrassed by the blunt, wide-eyed, Northern Dixon. It's almost as though he sees future silent comedy duos in this unlikely partnership. The book is endlessly cheeky, but it has a beating heart, and the heart is in the relationship of the eponymous surveyors. The closing pages are amongst the most haunting and straightforwardly moving that he has ever written - and yet, in them, there is still a tragic awareness of how American history is going to turn out... Yes, it's "picaresque", which is to say that it doesn't exactly have a swift, economical plot and isn't exactly unencumbered by digressions. But these are part of the pleasures of literature, or at least they were until the recent craze for the novel that you read in order to be able to say that you've read it. "Mason & Dixon" does not yield all its splendours in one go. Few good novels do. Hang on - make that _no_ good novels. Nabokov always said that you never really read a novel, you only reread it - meaning that if you get it all in the first reading, it probably wasn't worth writing. Pynchon took classes from Nabokov, and this lesson sunk in. The man is still the greatest, at least in my mother tongue. (Though I'll wave a small flag with John Berger's name on it, just because I can.) I just finished this book, and I look forward to a time when I've forgotten what it's like, so that I can read it again.
Rating: 
Summary: Strangely moving
Review: This ain't Gravity's Rainbow. Or V. Or Slow Learner. But it certainly is Pynchon. I can't say what prompted him to embark on this particular novel, addressing this particular story. Maybe he was bored and felt like he needed a challenge. Because this text is a challenge - certainly to read - and, I'd argue, due to its oddly constrained nature, to create. Because Pynchon has definitely put himself in something of a box here. He's telling a story dealing with historical figures, who did something definite and concrete - which sort of limits the span of the plot - no matter what else, Mason & Dixon are going to survey that line betwixt Pennsylania and Maryland, and then, a few years thereafter, die. To my 21st century mind, the two don't do all that much - in terms of an actual substantial plot, there doesn't seem to be much going on (especially if you contrast this with one of Pynchon's earlier works). Furthermore, Pynchon's locked himself in a stylistic box, choosing to write in the style of an 18th century novel, complete with (to me at least) random Capitalizations and long infinitely sub-claused sentences (though the latter is something of a trait of Pynchon, whatever style he's aping). This takes some getting used to, but I grew acustomed to the rhythms of the prose after a few hundred pages. So, given all these constraints that Pynchon placed around his writing, given the fact that there's not all that much in the way of a driving plot, this is a profoundly moving book. Mason and Dixon are, in my opinion, the most finely drawn characters Pynchon has ever created, and their friendship is lovingly (and perhaps even a touch sentimentally) depicted. At the end of this book I felt a deep sadness, not, as is usually the case, because I don't want this incredibly entertaining story to end, but because I didn't want to see these two characters go. Not a feeling I ususually get from a book, but Pynchon perfectly evokes it here. That is not to say that the old Pynchon that we know and love is totally absent here. Traces of his old madness abound: the self-aware, mechanical duck, complete with super-powers; the tendancy for the assorted characters to burst into song every now and then; the Torpedo (or electric eel, rather) on a tour of Pennsylania pubs. Make no mistake about it - this is a Pynchon novel. And, as I said, a rather moving Pynchon novel. Which was not at all what I expected, but which proved to be absoltely lovely.
| 
