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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
this one is gonna be a whole-summer thing. i can already tell it's going to be a whole-life thing too
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
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
Pynchon… I think I may be done with you now. Clockwork autonomic ducks with non-Newtonian power effects. And in the end, it fizzles like a poorly maintained wooden matchstick.
Holy fuck it's so fucking good and beautiful and heartbreaking and ambitious
Mason & Dixon the novel, is a giant, madly ambitious portrait of the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two British Surveyors/astronomers, most famous for their Mason-Dixon line, as a resolution to the border-dispute between Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware; currently functioning as a symbolic representation of the line separating the North and South.
The language of the book is written in a beautiful 18th century pastiche, oozing with a wonderful sense of adventure and potential, portraying the world with the optimism of the times. Dichotomously, there are also sections of great melancholy, especially when relating the haunted internal landscapes of Charles Mason.
Pynchon's novel takes us to the Dutch Cape in South Africa, to the City of Jamestown on the Island of St. Helena, to America, and to the North-Cape of Norway. Most of it takes place in America. Our titular characters meet George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, William Emerson, and other less known yet important historical figures. Pynchon ingeniously blends fact and fiction. While we meet with the great political and scientific figures of the age, we also meet fantastical creatures and geographical vistas; talking dogs, a Clay Golem, Underground elves of the Hollow-Earth, a giant flying duck-automaton, Zepho the Beaverman, and the haunting spirit of Rebekah. This blend is a perfect postmodern amalgam of the tension between Reason and Superstition, that so very much defined the age they were living in.
There are wonderful and enlightening sections in the book on truth and on history, asking questions about what truth is, and what we can know to be true about history, and history's function in our day-to-day lives. There are meditations on love and death and dreams. There are speculations about religion, man's need to explore the world, technology or "automata", aliens, about the Hollow-earth theory, and about ancient arcane civilizations existing on earth before us. There are sections on 18th century politics, on religion, about hedonism and about capitalism. There are heartbreaking and shocking reflections on slavery, colonialism and the Native Americans.
Most importantly, there are reflections on America. The violence of America. The potential of America. The spirit and magic of America.
“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"
It is also about how America is used and abused by the giant mechanistic governments of modernity, of mapping, of the unending material need to create borders, serving governments' needs for continual progression. It is about how individuals' desire to explore, to search for meaning and transcendence in the unknown (certainly in the case of Mason and Dixon), is used as tools for governments to perpetrate evil, to abolish the sacred, and to rob people of their land. For what purpose? The purpose of modernity, of trade, of colonialism and slavery, of simplification, of power; a double-edged sword; a creator of progress, technology and wealth, at the cost of so much suffering, and at the cost of the magical and the beautiful.
"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.”
There is a heartbreaking chapter about the 1763 Conestoga Massacre. The murder of 20 Susquehannock, portraying violence as something intrinsic to America:
"He sees where blows with Rifle-butts miss'd their Marks, and chipp'd the Walls. He sees blood in Corners never cleans'd. Thankful he is no longer a Child, else might he curse and weep... What in the Holy Names are these people about? Not even the Dutchmen at the Cape behav'd this way. Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their souls when they came?"
As a general tendency of Pynchon's postmodern sensibilities, and an interweaving of high and low culture, a lot of the contents of the book can be seen visually in various forms of modern pop-culture in various Hollywood films and video-games. The epic sea-battles and sea-travels reminds me of Peter Weir's 2003 film "Master and Commander". The whole book has a very adventury RPG feel with various fantastical elements and a large cast of weird and interesting characters, that make me think of the adventurisms of the Elder Scrolls games. The pervading meditations on arcane, highly technological civilizations of old, and of cryptic treasures and vistas not easily accessible, make me think of the Assassin's creed Franchise, specifically relating to the Isu, an in-game ancient civilization responsible for the creation of the "pieces of Eden".
I also thought I'd add: There is a chapter where Dixon takes what seems to me like a Terence McKenna-esque DMT trip through the North-Pole portal, to meet the arcane machine elves of the Hollow Earth, who are apparently watching "over" mankind from the center of the earth (no I'm not kidding, and I love that I'm not kidding).
What pervades most clearly in Mason & Dixon, and in many of Pynchon's other books, is what I would call an empathy of historical reality and of historical existence. That is, that every individual lives within an historical context, that this shapes their beliefs, their choices, what they value, and what they consider to be true. This also means that external political and social institutions control their lives to a large degree. Pynchon's novels often revolve around individuals attempting to navigate existence as historical beings, often attempting to rebel against the grand historical institutions of the time, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
On a simpler, yet perhaps even more important level, Pynchon's novel is a coming-of-age story. It is about the young idealism and adventurism of our protagonists at the beginning of their surveys, to their old age of regrets and nostalgic meditations on things done, people and places touched, and people and places they have been touched by. It is about the mortal human's search for meaning through ultimate revelations.
What is obvious is that Pynchon is a giant geek who has done a lot of drugs. His prose is extremely unique. His characters have heart. He is very difficult but extremely rewarding. He is a master-craftsman, developing an interesting vocabulary, a beautiful adventurous aesthetic, drawing reoccurring thematic lines all across his book. Most importantly, Pynchon shows us a bit of everything he has up his sleeve; his fantastic sense of humor, his extreme intellect, his near encyclopedic knowledge of niche political and social realities of the 18th century, his giant heart, his creative and childish faculties for fantasy and speculation, in the end weaving itself into an enormous mosh-pit of beautiful, hilarious, melancholic, hearbreaking, speculative and straight-up insane goodness. It is just so god damn incredible.
Mason & Dixon is a damn near perfect novel, especially considering its sheer ambition and size.
Mason & Dixon the novel, is a giant, madly ambitious portrait of the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two British Surveyors/astronomers, most famous for their Mason-Dixon line, as a resolution to the border-dispute between Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware; currently functioning as a symbolic representation of the line separating the North and South.
The language of the book is written in a beautiful 18th century pastiche, oozing with a wonderful sense of adventure and potential, portraying the world with the optimism of the times. Dichotomously, there are also sections of great melancholy, especially when relating the haunted internal landscapes of Charles Mason.
Pynchon's novel takes us to the Dutch Cape in South Africa, to the City of Jamestown on the Island of St. Helena, to America, and to the North-Cape of Norway. Most of it takes place in America. Our titular characters meet George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, William Emerson, and other less known yet important historical figures. Pynchon ingeniously blends fact and fiction. While we meet with the great political and scientific figures of the age, we also meet fantastical creatures and geographical vistas; talking dogs, a Clay Golem, Underground elves of the Hollow-Earth, a giant flying duck-automaton, Zepho the Beaverman, and the haunting spirit of Rebekah. This blend is a perfect postmodern amalgam of the tension between Reason and Superstition, that so very much defined the age they were living in.
There are wonderful and enlightening sections in the book on truth and on history, asking questions about what truth is, and what we can know to be true about history, and history's function in our day-to-day lives. There are meditations on love and death and dreams. There are speculations about religion, man's need to explore the world, technology or "automata", aliens, about the Hollow-earth theory, and about ancient arcane civilizations existing on earth before us. There are sections on 18th century politics, on religion, about hedonism and about capitalism. There are heartbreaking and shocking reflections on slavery, colonialism and the Native Americans.
Most importantly, there are reflections on America. The violence of America. The potential of America. The spirit and magic of America.
“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"
It is also about how America is used and abused by the giant mechanistic governments of modernity, of mapping, of the unending material need to create borders, serving governments' needs for continual progression. It is about how individuals' desire to explore, to search for meaning and transcendence in the unknown (certainly in the case of Mason and Dixon), is used as tools for governments to perpetrate evil, to abolish the sacred, and to rob people of their land. For what purpose? The purpose of modernity, of trade, of colonialism and slavery, of simplification, of power; a double-edged sword; a creator of progress, technology and wealth, at the cost of so much suffering, and at the cost of the magical and the beautiful.
"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.”
There is a heartbreaking chapter about the 1763 Conestoga Massacre. The murder of 20 Susquehannock, portraying violence as something intrinsic to America:
"He sees where blows with Rifle-butts miss'd their Marks, and chipp'd the Walls. He sees blood in Corners never cleans'd. Thankful he is no longer a Child, else might he curse and weep... What in the Holy Names are these people about? Not even the Dutchmen at the Cape behav'd this way. Is it something in this Wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their souls when they came?"
As a general tendency of Pynchon's postmodern sensibilities, and an interweaving of high and low culture, a lot of the contents of the book can be seen visually in various forms of modern pop-culture in various Hollywood films and video-games. The epic sea-battles and sea-travels reminds me of Peter Weir's 2003 film "Master and Commander". The whole book has a very adventury RPG feel with various fantastical elements and a large cast of weird and interesting characters, that make me think of the adventurisms of the Elder Scrolls games. The pervading meditations on arcane, highly technological civilizations of old, and of cryptic treasures and vistas not easily accessible, make me think of the Assassin's creed Franchise, specifically relating to the Isu, an in-game ancient civilization responsible for the creation of the "pieces of Eden".
I also thought I'd add: There is a chapter where Dixon takes what seems to me like a Terence McKenna-esque DMT trip through the North-Pole portal, to meet the arcane machine elves of the Hollow Earth, who are apparently watching "over" mankind from the center of the earth (no I'm not kidding, and I love that I'm not kidding).
What pervades most clearly in Mason & Dixon, and in many of Pynchon's other books, is what I would call an empathy of historical reality and of historical existence. That is, that every individual lives within an historical context, that this shapes their beliefs, their choices, what they value, and what they consider to be true. This also means that external political and social institutions control their lives to a large degree. Pynchon's novels often revolve around individuals attempting to navigate existence as historical beings, often attempting to rebel against the grand historical institutions of the time, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
On a simpler, yet perhaps even more important level, Pynchon's novel is a coming-of-age story. It is about the young idealism and adventurism of our protagonists at the beginning of their surveys, to their old age of regrets and nostalgic meditations on things done, people and places touched, and people and places they have been touched by. It is about the mortal human's search for meaning through ultimate revelations.
What is obvious is that Pynchon is a giant geek who has done a lot of drugs. His prose is extremely unique. His characters have heart. He is very difficult but extremely rewarding. He is a master-craftsman, developing an interesting vocabulary, a beautiful adventurous aesthetic, drawing reoccurring thematic lines all across his book. Most importantly, Pynchon shows us a bit of everything he has up his sleeve; his fantastic sense of humor, his extreme intellect, his near encyclopedic knowledge of niche political and social realities of the 18th century, his giant heart, his creative and childish faculties for fantasy and speculation, in the end weaving itself into an enormous mosh-pit of beautiful, hilarious, melancholic, hearbreaking, speculative and straight-up insane goodness. It is just so god damn incredible.
Mason & Dixon is a damn near perfect novel, especially considering its sheer ambition and size.
What a book! Vintage Pynchon, a stunning work of virtuosity and inventiveness. As impressive as Gravity's Rainbow is, I think M&D surpasses it with its richness of language, history, and humanity. It's been a long time since I felt this deflated finishing the final page of a book.
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“Is it something in this wilderness, something ancient, that waited for them, and infected their souls when they came?”
Portrays the founding of America as something irrevocably evil, a business deal sealed with genocide, all in order to make a few bucks. It also interrogates the idea of boundaries in general, and the ways in which they are used mostly to just further the causes of capital. It is a fantasy set on the dark continent during the age of reason. Of course, to try to sum up this book’s themes in a few sentences is utterly impossible, there is so much going on that I could write multiple papers on this thing, and I’m sure there’s still a ton that I missed. It is a novel that is completely stuffed full of ideas (werewolves, ghosts, the invention of pizza, a mechanical duck, a talking dog, Jesuit conspiracies, giant vegetables, medieval worms, feng shui, the hollow earth, astrology, a disembodied ear) that also manages to somehow feel coherent and whole. Not only that, it is genuinely emotional at times, and Mason and Dixon are both complex, layered characters. Sure, it’s a little long winded in parts, and I’m still not a big fan of when writers imitate the prose style of older literature, but this thing is a genuinely great piece of writing. Thematically dense, deeply moving, funny—this baby’s got it all. And at its core it’s about the love between two bros. What more could you want? It’s too bad late era Pynchon is so overlooked because this is right up there with his best stuff.
Portrays the founding of America as something irrevocably evil, a business deal sealed with genocide, all in order to make a few bucks. It also interrogates the idea of boundaries in general, and the ways in which they are used mostly to just further the causes of capital. It is a fantasy set on the dark continent during the age of reason. Of course, to try to sum up this book’s themes in a few sentences is utterly impossible, there is so much going on that I could write multiple papers on this thing, and I’m sure there’s still a ton that I missed. It is a novel that is completely stuffed full of ideas (werewolves, ghosts, the invention of pizza, a mechanical duck, a talking dog, Jesuit conspiracies, giant vegetables, medieval worms, feng shui, the hollow earth, astrology, a disembodied ear) that also manages to somehow feel coherent and whole. Not only that, it is genuinely emotional at times, and Mason and Dixon are both complex, layered characters. Sure, it’s a little long winded in parts, and I’m still not a big fan of when writers imitate the prose style of older literature, but this thing is a genuinely great piece of writing. Thematically dense, deeply moving, funny—this baby’s got it all. And at its core it’s about the love between two bros. What more could you want? It’s too bad late era Pynchon is so overlooked because this is right up there with his best stuff.
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.”
Reading a Pynchon novel is more akin to embarking on a research project than enjoying a book. The only way you can really understand what's going on (and even then, one will probably only understand about 85-90%) is to use the wikis on the internet that provide copious footnotes for the myriad references, in jokes and history lessons that populate his works. This one is really good: http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
That being said, Mason and Dixon is near-perfect. It tells the story of the famous surveyors who drew the line that split the eastern half of the US in half and this action would have repercussions for the next 200 years. It's also a story of a friendship and even a rivalry between two men who were thrown together and spent much of their lives working on various projects for the British government.
This isn't just their story though, but also the birth of America through the eyes of many characters, real and fictional. There is history, mythology, and apocrypha here aplenty. Informative, entertaining, but above all, reeking of vintage Pynchonian bat shit craziness, the effort that it takes to read this is definitely worth the time. I would have to say this is my second favorite Pynchon, after Gravity's Rainbow.
That being said, Mason and Dixon is near-perfect. It tells the story of the famous surveyors who drew the line that split the eastern half of the US in half and this action would have repercussions for the next 200 years. It's also a story of a friendship and even a rivalry between two men who were thrown together and spent much of their lives working on various projects for the British government.
This isn't just their story though, but also the birth of America through the eyes of many characters, real and fictional. There is history, mythology, and apocrypha here aplenty. Informative, entertaining, but above all, reeking of vintage Pynchonian bat shit craziness, the effort that it takes to read this is definitely worth the time. I would have to say this is my second favorite Pynchon, after Gravity's Rainbow.
Oh, man. Tommy P. Took me 3000 pages of Pynchon to finally start to understand what in the hell he's talking about...