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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Simultaneously a thoroughly researched retelling of the historical events leading to the birth of the West as we know it today and a rip-roaring spectacle of fantastical hilarity conjured by the unreliable narrator Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke.
I had no prior knowledge of (or, admittedly, much interest in) any of the real Mason and Dixon's ventures and mishaps going into this one, yet Pynchon's reimagining kept me hooked throughout; From their fateful meeting in Portsmouth, to the gradual formation of their eponymous line, the chemistry between the titular characters is as whimsically charming as that of Against The Day's Chums of Chance. The supporting characters also provide plenty of tantalising tangents to the main narrative: including everything from the first English pizza, forest golem's who only remain invisible if they move and a Frenchman's paranoid anecdotes about his maniacal mechanical duck.
All this is employed through Pynchon's familiar labyrinthine style (though much more dialogue heavy this time around, fittingly adjusted with a mock-up-1700s English vernacular) and it's clear he aims to entertain rather than inform. Though this isn't trying to be a wholly historically accurate biography of M&D, for what it is I enjoyed the madness of it and I look forward to my next outing into Pynchon's weird fictional universe: a mashup of real world history and science fantasy.
I had no prior knowledge of (or, admittedly, much interest in) any of the real Mason and Dixon's ventures and mishaps going into this one, yet Pynchon's reimagining kept me hooked throughout; From their fateful meeting in Portsmouth, to the gradual formation of their eponymous line, the chemistry between the titular characters is as whimsically charming as that of Against The Day's Chums of Chance. The supporting characters also provide plenty of tantalising tangents to the main narrative: including everything from the first English pizza, forest golem's who only remain invisible if they move and a Frenchman's paranoid anecdotes about his maniacal mechanical duck.
All this is employed through Pynchon's familiar labyrinthine style (though much more dialogue heavy this time around, fittingly adjusted with a mock-up-1700s English vernacular) and it's clear he aims to entertain rather than inform. Though this isn't trying to be a wholly historically accurate biography of M&D, for what it is I enjoyed the madness of it and I look forward to my next outing into Pynchon's weird fictional universe: a mashup of real world history and science fantasy.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
WHEEEEW. Finally finished with this monster, it didn't take me as long as "Gravity's Rainbow" but it also took me over a month. In hindsight I probably should have bridged GR and this together with something shorter, and me immediately starting it back to back probably owed much to my struggling with it in the beginning, but much like GR I am endlessly gratified to have stuck it out. This is, thus far, Pynchon's kindest novel, and therefore I'm inclined to love it - an empathetic, texturally blooming wealth of character, humor, setpieces, one-of-a-kind prose, surreal magic and Pynchon's ostensibly infinite eye for immense historical detail, in a tome that feels as thematically modern as it does defined by the time period and culture it is set in. So much wonderful stuff is working at once here that went over my head yet still kept me completely ensnared, in true Thomas Pynchon fashion. This might be a difficult review to write but I'll try my hand, as something as immense as this deserves its due.
I’m sure it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I LOVED the nested story structure of this novel, especially like this where it’s steeped in as much upfront artifice as possible, I can’t help but admire how this one took it all the way. The entire story is narrated by Cherrycoke, or at least we are to understand that he’s recounting the events to his family in some sort of long-winded detail, but he obviously could not have the depth of memory and detail as the tales he spins of Mason and Dixon and their misadventures are, because he’d have to have the insight of a god. But we already know from the start that Cherrycoke is prone to fabrication, because he admits he was not at Mason and Dixon’s side for much of the journey [in fact he’s only around for about half of it]. How much of Cherrycoke’s involvement is real and how much of it is an American fable to match the wit and mythopoetic qualities of the prose? Pynchon takes it even further when we’re trusted to understand that Cherrycoke is supposedly even narrating people’s stories that he couldn’t have possibly met at any time. And in general I love how he and the family will jump into the narrative at inopportune times, playfully intruding upon the text when an outside observation is made or sometimes seemingly at their own behest. And the [gorgeously written, consistently some of the novel’s most impressive passages] academic excerpts from Cherrycoke’s books just add a cherry on top to the layer cake of metatextuality this is. This whole thing is layered story-upon-story from various characters at various times, and of all of Pynchon's works I've read so far this might have the most genuinely Matryoshkan structure - and does it matter what is real or not? Things meaningfully happening are more important than things literally happening, and this is PACKED with meaning and subtext on every page
This is the subtlest of Pynchon’s output that I’ve read yet and tbh I’d be surprised if he gets any subtler than this elsewhere. Obviously to call it subtle in a vacuum would be kind of ridiculous, because this literally features talking clocks, automated ducks, and classic Pynchon slapstick and shenanigans pretty much everywhere. But there’s an artfully rendered quietness about the sensory and character detail in the novel, a tender focus on Humanity that was not as prevalent in the desperate shout into the void of “Gravity’s Rainbow”. The title characters’ relationship is the emotional cornerstone of the novel, and despite the wacky world Pynchon’s characters inhabit, it’s as real and human a relationship as I’ve ever seen come from him; Mason and Dixon’s relationship develops in an appropriately muted fashion, bouncing around a lot of conflicting attitudes and feelings toward each other in the way real life friendships gradually establish familiarity and empathy. If “Gravity’s Rainbow” is an explosive Vaudeville performance powered by nuclear energy and LSD, “Mason and Dixon” is the cozy, stoned haze of some delightful opium tea in a tavern. Still trippy with still enough bizarrerie to keep it firmly in the realms of postmodernism, but there’s a lot more control over the trip in this one, a lot more reminders that the reader is still inhabiting a human form. Helps that chapters are short and often follow an ostensibly episodic format, meaning you can basically let go and take a breather any time you want if the sheer density [and there’s still plenty of that here] gets to be too much.
All that being said, godDAMN did this one have possibly an even harder opening stretch for me than even GR did, which I know is probably the opposite of most people. For the first three-hundred pages or so, I felt like I was fighting the novel at the same rate I was trying to meet it on its level, trying desperately to form some coherent logic around what at first seemed to be completely inscrutable. I suppose the reason the first third felt like pushing up against a brick wall was multiple factors working in tandem - the unfamiliar eighteenth century prose itself, the endless wealth of information about surveying and astronomy and their relationship to the development of the west, and the vastness of Pynchon’s references to obscure history that have been completely buried from the public conscience. Of course, GR has the latter in spades as well, and while the vast majority of the references there also went way over my head as expected, I at least have enough familiarity with that novel’s time period and sociopolitical backdrop that I had a lot more to grab onto from the start. MnD on the other hand felt like learning both the prose style and the time period congruently, and man, if it wasn’t a bit of a migraine at first. And unlike GR, I also don’t think this had a concrete “click moment” for me - I pretty much just worked my way through it bit by bit and eventually, somewhere down the line, I began to accept it for what it was. Even up to the end some passages were like hieroglyphics to me, but any sense of frustration I had wrt my confusion just gradually melted away the more I adjusted to this book, and it also helped to realize Mason and Dixon themselves are also struggling to find an answer to what is perhaps unanswerable. At its best moments, I felt just as lost as they did, and it worked even more in making me connect with their characters.
And something that took its time to develop for me, in fact over five-hundred pages to realize it, but when it did, it walloped me in the face; this is, in large part, a ghost story. Not only for the abundance of ghosts real or sensationalized Mason, Dixon and co. come across on their travels; whether that be Rebekah’s communications with Mason from the beyond, figures like the sky-traveling countess and her squire from one of Dixon’s memories, the “Third Surveyor” or any of the countless others, it was thru the abundance of these figures that I realized the importance of ghostliness to the novel as a whole. This is a book that’s very much about the ghosts of American history - phantoms of colonial America buried under centuries of revised or repressed history that has been obscured [whether through colonialism or cultural progression or both], of a world totally unlike the one we live in today but one we can still see the phantasmal outline of in every day life in America. History is a specter whose presence will always be felt even if we can never look directly upon it and experience it as it was, and its ghost will always remain with us for better or worse.
And just viscerally, holy moly some of the setpieces here and individual pieces of storytelling are among some of Pynchon’s best, and the back half of the book especially just seemingly delivers them chapter after chapter at an intoxicating pace. Mason’s spacetime-warping adventure [or whatever the heck that was], the Frenchman and his duck, the conversing clocks, the mock-chivalric tale of Lambton and his battle against a giant worm, and the book-within-a-book [which I didn’t even realize was what it was until about fifteen pages into it!] that moves seamlessly into Mason and Dixon’s central story, it’s all fucking phenomenal pretty much. The novel works very much as its own compendium of off-kilter American folktales that take from reality yet Pynchon makes it completely his own and once I realized that this is where the novel draws its allure from is when I really began to find myself unable to put it down.
It all came together for me at the end. Those last fifty pages are pretty much absolutely fucking perfect. All the wacky-but-inviting pretense of the preceding 700 pages gives way to some of the warmest, most empathetic and undeniably human heights Pynchon has ever penned from what I have read. Part I and II explore the slow building of these men's friendship, Part III explores the absolute extent of the love shared between the two at their core and ties this rollicking adventure to a close in a way so resoundingly moving I could not have ever expected it from the man who wrote "Gravity's Rainbow" [which is a book whose characters I find moving in some ways, even on its own terms]. So gorgeously suffused in quiet philosophizing and the nature and development of relationships and of course the west, all beautifully summated in that ending. An absolute fucking masterclass in empathetic storytelling.
Other stuff: love Cherrycoke's family as a whole [Brae especially, and how she'll often act as a cheeky counterpoint to the men and is much more attentive than she lets on], the astronomy stuff in general because I can never get enough of night-sky imagery, the ying-and-yang emphasized between God and science, the perfectly integrated moments of wondrous magical realism informed by very real history; man, what a novel this is, especially as it was so difficult in the beginning for me that I contemplated putting it down and uncovering its eccentricities later. Sticking it out, much like "Gravity's Rainbow", was an extremely rewarding choice. And also much like that book, I will becoming back to this through the years without a doubt; it's just too good and too dense with mystery and intrigue to relegate it to a single reading. This really feels like the heart of Pynchon's work, and I can't help but be completely taken with it.
“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.”
I’m sure it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I LOVED the nested story structure of this novel, especially like this where it’s steeped in as much upfront artifice as possible, I can’t help but admire how this one took it all the way. The entire story is narrated by Cherrycoke, or at least we are to understand that he’s recounting the events to his family in some sort of long-winded detail, but he obviously could not have the depth of memory and detail as the tales he spins of Mason and Dixon and their misadventures are, because he’d have to have the insight of a god. But we already know from the start that Cherrycoke is prone to fabrication, because he admits he was not at Mason and Dixon’s side for much of the journey [in fact he’s only around for about half of it]. How much of Cherrycoke’s involvement is real and how much of it is an American fable to match the wit and mythopoetic qualities of the prose? Pynchon takes it even further when we’re trusted to understand that Cherrycoke is supposedly even narrating people’s stories that he couldn’t have possibly met at any time. And in general I love how he and the family will jump into the narrative at inopportune times, playfully intruding upon the text when an outside observation is made or sometimes seemingly at their own behest. And the [gorgeously written, consistently some of the novel’s most impressive passages] academic excerpts from Cherrycoke’s books just add a cherry on top to the layer cake of metatextuality this is. This whole thing is layered story-upon-story from various characters at various times, and of all of Pynchon's works I've read so far this might have the most genuinely Matryoshkan structure - and does it matter what is real or not? Things meaningfully happening are more important than things literally happening, and this is PACKED with meaning and subtext on every page
This is the subtlest of Pynchon’s output that I’ve read yet and tbh I’d be surprised if he gets any subtler than this elsewhere. Obviously to call it subtle in a vacuum would be kind of ridiculous, because this literally features talking clocks, automated ducks, and classic Pynchon slapstick and shenanigans pretty much everywhere. But there’s an artfully rendered quietness about the sensory and character detail in the novel, a tender focus on Humanity that was not as prevalent in the desperate shout into the void of “Gravity’s Rainbow”. The title characters’ relationship is the emotional cornerstone of the novel, and despite the wacky world Pynchon’s characters inhabit, it’s as real and human a relationship as I’ve ever seen come from him; Mason and Dixon’s relationship develops in an appropriately muted fashion, bouncing around a lot of conflicting attitudes and feelings toward each other in the way real life friendships gradually establish familiarity and empathy. If “Gravity’s Rainbow” is an explosive Vaudeville performance powered by nuclear energy and LSD, “Mason and Dixon” is the cozy, stoned haze of some delightful opium tea in a tavern. Still trippy with still enough bizarrerie to keep it firmly in the realms of postmodernism, but there’s a lot more control over the trip in this one, a lot more reminders that the reader is still inhabiting a human form. Helps that chapters are short and often follow an ostensibly episodic format, meaning you can basically let go and take a breather any time you want if the sheer density [and there’s still plenty of that here] gets to be too much.
All that being said, godDAMN did this one have possibly an even harder opening stretch for me than even GR did, which I know is probably the opposite of most people. For the first three-hundred pages or so, I felt like I was fighting the novel at the same rate I was trying to meet it on its level, trying desperately to form some coherent logic around what at first seemed to be completely inscrutable. I suppose the reason the first third felt like pushing up against a brick wall was multiple factors working in tandem - the unfamiliar eighteenth century prose itself, the endless wealth of information about surveying and astronomy and their relationship to the development of the west, and the vastness of Pynchon’s references to obscure history that have been completely buried from the public conscience. Of course, GR has the latter in spades as well, and while the vast majority of the references there also went way over my head as expected, I at least have enough familiarity with that novel’s time period and sociopolitical backdrop that I had a lot more to grab onto from the start. MnD on the other hand felt like learning both the prose style and the time period congruently, and man, if it wasn’t a bit of a migraine at first. And unlike GR, I also don’t think this had a concrete “click moment” for me - I pretty much just worked my way through it bit by bit and eventually, somewhere down the line, I began to accept it for what it was. Even up to the end some passages were like hieroglyphics to me, but any sense of frustration I had wrt my confusion just gradually melted away the more I adjusted to this book, and it also helped to realize Mason and Dixon themselves are also struggling to find an answer to what is perhaps unanswerable. At its best moments, I felt just as lost as they did, and it worked even more in making me connect with their characters.
And something that took its time to develop for me, in fact over five-hundred pages to realize it, but when it did, it walloped me in the face; this is, in large part, a ghost story. Not only for the abundance of ghosts real or sensationalized Mason, Dixon and co. come across on their travels; whether that be Rebekah’s communications with Mason from the beyond, figures like the sky-traveling countess and her squire from one of Dixon’s memories, the “Third Surveyor” or any of the countless others, it was thru the abundance of these figures that I realized the importance of ghostliness to the novel as a whole. This is a book that’s very much about the ghosts of American history - phantoms of colonial America buried under centuries of revised or repressed history that has been obscured [whether through colonialism or cultural progression or both], of a world totally unlike the one we live in today but one we can still see the phantasmal outline of in every day life in America. History is a specter whose presence will always be felt even if we can never look directly upon it and experience it as it was, and its ghost will always remain with us for better or worse.
And just viscerally, holy moly some of the setpieces here and individual pieces of storytelling are among some of Pynchon’s best, and the back half of the book especially just seemingly delivers them chapter after chapter at an intoxicating pace. Mason’s spacetime-warping adventure [or whatever the heck that was], the Frenchman and his duck, the conversing clocks, the mock-chivalric tale of Lambton and his battle against a giant worm, and the book-within-a-book [which I didn’t even realize was what it was until about fifteen pages into it!] that moves seamlessly into Mason and Dixon’s central story, it’s all fucking phenomenal pretty much. The novel works very much as its own compendium of off-kilter American folktales that take from reality yet Pynchon makes it completely his own and once I realized that this is where the novel draws its allure from is when I really began to find myself unable to put it down.
It all came together for me at the end. Those last fifty pages are pretty much absolutely fucking perfect. All the wacky-but-inviting pretense of the preceding 700 pages gives way to some of the warmest, most empathetic and undeniably human heights Pynchon has ever penned from what I have read. Part I and II explore the slow building of these men's friendship, Part III explores the absolute extent of the love shared between the two at their core and ties this rollicking adventure to a close in a way so resoundingly moving I could not have ever expected it from the man who wrote "Gravity's Rainbow" [which is a book whose characters I find moving in some ways, even on its own terms]. So gorgeously suffused in quiet philosophizing and the nature and development of relationships and of course the west, all beautifully summated in that ending. An absolute fucking masterclass in empathetic storytelling.
Other stuff: love Cherrycoke's family as a whole [Brae especially, and how she'll often act as a cheeky counterpoint to the men and is much more attentive than she lets on], the astronomy stuff in general because I can never get enough of night-sky imagery, the ying-and-yang emphasized between God and science, the perfectly integrated moments of wondrous magical realism informed by very real history; man, what a novel this is, especially as it was so difficult in the beginning for me that I contemplated putting it down and uncovering its eccentricities later. Sticking it out, much like "Gravity's Rainbow", was an extremely rewarding choice. And also much like that book, I will becoming back to this through the years without a doubt; it's just too good and too dense with mystery and intrigue to relegate it to a single reading. This really feels like the heart of Pynchon's work, and I can't help but be completely taken with it.
“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.”
challenging
funny
informative
lighthearted
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
3.5 but goodreads won't let me do that, sooo...
Probably the hardest book I've ever read. Not exactly a pleasure read, but there were some enjoyable parts. I feel very accomplished for having read it. Definitely a book I'm going to have to revisit in the future.
Probably the hardest book I've ever read. Not exactly a pleasure read, but there were some enjoyable parts. I feel very accomplished for having read it. Definitely a book I'm going to have to revisit in the future.
Maybe the most entertaining artwork out there.
I'm not sure I can really write a review but I loved it and I didn't think I would! It's historical fiction, which I love, and there's so much great trivia about stuff from the time, and tons of astronomy, which I think is interesting. Also, it has humor which, I don't know why, but I didn't think I was going to find any or that I wouldn't get it. I also didn't expect there would be fantasy elements in the story; I thought it would be all political and social commentary, which it was, but so much more. Actually, reading this book made me feel like I want to try another one of Pynchon's books - maybe next year. One must build up the stamina to read such a tome. It took me 7 weeks.