The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
Robert L. McLaughlin

Thomas Pynchon. Mason & Dixon. Henry Holt, 1997. 773 pp. $27.50.

In 1990, when, after seventeen novel-less years, Thomas Pynchon published Vineland, old Pynchon hands everywhere moaned: we waited so long for this? This is the successor to Gravity’s Rainbow? Well, after teaching it several times, I’ve developed a lot of respect and affection for Vineland. Still, this time there’s to be no moaning: Mason & Dixon is the real thing, the novel we’ve been waiting for, and, yes, it turns out to have been worth the wait. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, it is an encyclopedia of esoteric knowledge, it brings together everyday, historical, and fantastic characters, it passionately opposes the forces of objectification and control, but not without making problematic those who represent life and freedom, it contains both outrageous jokes and passages so beautiful you want to cry.
The novel focuses on astronomer Charles Mason, surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, and their lines, most famously the Line they measured separating Pennsylvania and Maryland and thus the North from the South in just-pre-Revolutionary America, but also the line made by Venus as it crosses the face of the sun, the lines representing Mason’s and Dixon’s life stories and the narrative we’re reading, the “lines” Mason, Dixon, and the other characters speak, fishing lines, and, perhaps most important, the lines connecting one person to another. The central image of the novel, the Mason-Dixon Line seems to represent, in the words of Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow, “the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from.” Of course, the America Mason and Dixon find is hardly Edenic; the coffeehouses of Philadelphia, Annapolis, and New York seethe with the machinations of various nations, religions, political factions, and mysterious controlling forces—including the Royal Society and the Jesuits. Still, the Line represents the processes of division, rationalization, and control that have resulted in the America we have inherited. On the one hand, the Line manifests America’s Original Sins, both westward expansion, as Mason and Dixon cut their line through the forests and encroach on Indian lands, and the separation of America into “free” and slave-holding territories. But on the other hand, the Line, as it is being measured, draws to itself an increasingly strange collection of oddballs and outcasts—a great French chef and the mechanical duck impossibly in love with him, a Chinese geomancer on the run from the Jesuits, a woman who is compelled to perform as a street show a miniature re-creation of the Battle of Leuthen, a secret agent from an unknown northern land posing as a Swedish axman—people who in all likelihood won’t fit in to the America Mason and Dixon are helping to define. Moreover, as they move west, farther from the more settled, civilized, and rationalized east, they come into contact more frequently with the marvelous and the fantastic—my favorite: a were-beaver who loses a tree-cutting contest when a lunar eclipse, unpredicted by the astronomers, inconveniently turns him back into a human.
If this potential for ad hoc community and the magical is part of what is lost to America as a result of the Line, the novel also recognizes the potential for love among people. Mason and Dixon spend years together, coming into conflict personally and professionally, bickering endlessly, and it is only in their last meetings, annual fishing expeditions in the north of England, that they come tentatively and inarticulately to recognize their affection for each other and to use this affection as a way of connecting with others in their lives—parents, spouses, children. If Gravity’s Rainbow ends with disturbing, apocalyptic power, Mason & Dixon ends touchingly, with nostalgia for what’s been lost and hope for what might, even now, be found.
There are reminders of other authors here—the Barth of The Sot-Weed Factor, the Vollmann of the Seven Dreams series—but Iam most reminded of Pynchon at his best, especially Gravity’s Rainbow. My guess is that Mason & Dixon is an easier first read than Gravity’s Rainbow but that a first reading gives only a hint of what the novel offers: Pynchon scholars—as if they weren’t busy enough—will find plenty here to occupy their time into the next century. Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement, certainly the novel of the year, possibly the novel of our time. [Robert L. McLaughlin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon Robert L. McLaughlin Thomas Pynchon. Mason & Dixon. Henry Holt, 1997. 773 pp. $27.50. In 1990, when, after seventeen novel-less years, Thomas Pynchon published Vineland, old Pynchon hands everywhere moaned: we waited so long for this? This is the successor to Gravity’s Rainbow? Well, after teaching it several times, I’ve developed a lot of respect and affection for Vineland. Still, this time there’s to be no moaning: Mason & Dixon is the real thing, the novel we’ve been waiting for, and, yes, it turns out to have been worth the wait. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, it is an encyclopedia of esoteric knowledge, it brings together everyday, historical, and fantastic characters, it passionately opposes the forces of objectification and control, but not without making problematic those who represent life and freedom, it contains both outrageous jokes and passages so beautiful you want to cry. The novel focuses on astronomer Charles Mason, surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, and their lines, most famously the Line they measured separating Pennsylvania and Maryland and thus the North from the South in just-pre-Revolutionary America, but also the line made by Venus as it crosses the face of the sun, the lines representing Mason’s and Dixon’s life stories and the narrative we’re reading, the “lines” Mason, Dixon, and the other characters speak, fishing lines, and, perhaps most important, the lines connecting one person to another. The central image of the novel, the Mason-Dixon Line seems to represent, in the words of Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow, “the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from.” Of course, the America Mason and Dixon find is hardly Edenic; the coffeehouses of Philadelphia, Annapolis, and New York seethe with the machinations of various nations, religions, political factions, and mysterious controlling forces—including the Royal Society and the Jesuits. Still, the Line represents the processes of division, rationalization, and control that have resulted in the America we have inherited. On the one hand, the Line manifests America’s Original Sins, both westward expansion, as Mason and Dixon cut their line through the forests and encroach on Indian lands, and the separation of America into “free” and slave-holding territories. But on the other hand, the Line, as it is being measured, draws to itself an increasingly strange collection of oddballs and outcasts—a great French chef and the mechanical duck impossibly in love with him, a Chinese geomancer on the run from the Jesuits, a woman who is compelled to perform as a street show a miniature re-creation of the Battle of Leuthen, a secret agent from an unknown northern land posing as a Swedish axman—people who in all likelihood won’t fit in to the America Mason and Dixon are helping to define. Moreover, as they move west, farther from the more settled, civilized, and rationalized east, they come into contact more frequently with the marvelous and the fantastic—my favorite: a were-beaver who loses a tree-cutting contest when a lunar eclipse, unpredicted by the astronomers, inconveniently turns him back into a human. If this potential for ad hoc community and the magical is part of what is lost to America as a result of the Line, the novel also recognizes the potential for love among people. Mason and Dixon spend years together, coming into conflict personally and professionally, bickering endlessly, and it is only in their last meetings, annual fishing expeditions in the north of England, that they come tentatively and inarticulately to recognize their affection for each other and to use this affection as a way of connecting with others in their lives—parents, spouses, children. If Gravity’s Rainbow ends with disturbing, apocalyptic power, Mason & Dixon ends touchingly, with nostalgia for what’s been lost and hope for what might, even now, be found. There are reminders of other authors here—the Barth of The Sot-Weed Factor, the Vollmann of the Seven Dreams series—but Iam most reminded of Pynchon at his best, especially Gravity’s Rainbow. My guess is that Mason & Dixon is an easier first read than Gravity’s Rainbow but that a first reading gives only a hint of what the novel offers: Pynchon scholars—as if they weren’t busy enough—will find plenty here to occupy their time into the next century. Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement, certainly the novel of the year, possibly the novel of our time. [Robert L. McLaughlin]

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