Mason & Dixon

Rating:
Summary: Pynchon may be the finest writer of this century.
Review: I first read Pynchon about 30 years ago. Unlike some friends who can remember every character and situation of Gravity's Rainbow or V., it was not specific characters or events which most intrigued me in Pynchon's writing, but the sense of place he invokes. The place is not geographic, but experiential. To read Pynchon seriously (and this requires a certain suspension of disbelief), to follow his logic through(it is there, though sometimes difficult)is to experience a paradigm shift. One cannot read Pynchon and fail to experience the world a bit differently afterward. With Mason & Dixon, not only does Pynchon more clearly develop the significance of his theory of Entropy as it applies to human society (the obliteration of the mythic, the homogenization of culture, the blanding of the imagination), but he demonstrates that he has become wordsmith without equal in (at least)current English literature. The meaning of this work aside, it must be read by everyone who writes or wishes to write for the sheer beuty of its prose.This novel represents a synthesis of historic and scientific knowledge, social analysis, wit, insight and sheer mastery of description unequalled by anything I have seen in Twentieth Century literature. Don't be afraid of this book. Be afraid to be afraid of it.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult but rewarding
Review: Mason and Dixon is another epic Pynchonian tale. As many other reviewers have said, it isn't that easy to read. It takes time and patience and a lot of perserverance, but it is definitely worth it. The basic philosophy of the novel is dualism. There are opposing twins of everything - Mason and Dixon themselves; the stories of Mason and Dixon within that told by Rev Cherrycoke; Cherrycoke's relations, Pliny and Pitt, either Elder or Younger; Northern and Southern states of America; the differing philosophies of the Western world and the Eastern world; the differing attitudes of Art and Science (very much of importance in the 18th century); the Romantic and Gothic; the straight man and the comedian; Johnson and Boswell (who appear at the end and who are foreshadowed by Cherrycoke in the Boswellian role); Britain and America; European philosophy versus Native American philosophy; war and peace - the list goes on. A very good article to read on this is Ken Rosenbaum's in the New York Book Review. He saw this dualism as a metaphor of the zeroes and ones that obsess Pynchon: the hot and cold atoms as sorted by the Maxwell's Demon of CL49, the hot and cold states of America divided by Mason and Dixon. And through it they create the perfect "line" that is neither one nor the other, that exists but doesn't really. Pynchon is interested in the difference between the extremes of life, such as noise and silence, light and dark, being and nothingness. Mason and Dixon has apparently been on Pynchon's mind since the 70s, and it is very much a culmination of his life's obsession.

We have to search the novel for references and echoes. Look at the cover of the book. I'm sure it cannot be a coincidence that the "&" is the main symbol. Mason and Dixon is about the things that join us and divide us, the "&" between us all. And surely there is an echo in the fact that "Mason", "Dixon" and "Pynchon" all end in "-on", and that they line up on the book's spine. Pynchon, with his curious eye for detail and coincidence, could not have ignored that.

Like in his other works, Pynchon manages to create a link between his books. They form a great bustling world. Pig Bodine (from V) has an ancestor who appears in Mason and Dixon, and Cherrycoke's descendent appears in Gravity's Rainbow. Characters link in again, forming a total corpus of Pynchonian achievement.

Another thing that Rosenbaum's article mentions is the Transit of Venus that takes up a large chunk of the novel (the line-making seems to take ages to come along). Rosenbaum sees this as the Transit of V-ness, as if Pynchon is having another joke on us. He gives it connations that are too detailed to mention here, but should be read by interested readers.

I must reiterate that this is not a simple book. It requires work. It took me over a month to read. It is as long as GR. And it is written in an 18th century style, so it is often confusing and distracting. However, it is very funny and up to the usual standard of Pynchonian research. It is highly accurate (you can do your own checking)in the ideas, events and speech (including Mason and Dixon's differing dialects); and the mysterious fact that we know only the date of Dixon's birth allows Pynchon's mind to run riot - he has him flying over Durham with his teacher, walking into bizarre cave structures where everything is upside down, and so on.

This is a challenging but highly rewarding philosophical novel, bawdy, 18th century in many ways. It is one of Pynchon's greatest works, and although people are always wary to classify a work so soon, I believe it can be located quite happily next to GR.

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.