The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Pynchon and "Mason & Dixon" by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds.
Alexander Theroux

Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and “Mason & Dixon.” Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000. 228 pp. $39.50.

Eleven essays (and one generous bibliography on various critical responses by Clifford Mead) are here gathered to elucidate, clarify, and analyze Mr. Pynchon’s long fifth novel, the reveries in an eighteenth-century style of Rev’d Wicks Cherrycoke, an aging British parson who twenty years before had accompanied Mason and Dixon hacking their east-west line to mark the separation of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Several wonderfully elaborated essays: Arthur Saltzman’s well-reasoned “Cranks of Ev’ry Radius,” which documents the optimistic linearity of the novel; Donald Greiner’s insightful “Thomas Pynchon and the Fault Lines of America,” which points out that Mason and Dixon are both “New World Adams [as in Eve] who pushed westward yet find not an Edenic paradise or a soiled hell but both”; and David Seed’s “Mapping the Course of Empire in the New World,” which regards surveying matters; and Joseph Dewey’s “The Sound of One Man Mapping,” quite brilliant on Pynchon and “balance.” Much grad school gobbledygook elsewhere, hypertextual frenzifying, like Irving Malin’s “Foreshadowing the Text,” in which, like a raddled entomologist documenting ant-farm behavior, he makes nine journal entries over nine days, earnestly (and artlessly) telescoping on certain words (“Notice that the word ‘slap’ introduces, if only somewhat briefly, the idea of violence”) and little themes. At one point, in one of his great pedantic glosses regarding snowballs, he notes: “There is a kind of circularity here.” Um. Yuh. [Alexander Theroux]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Pynchon and "Mason & Dixon" by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds. Alexander Theroux Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, eds. Pynchon and “Mason & Dixon.” Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000. 228 pp. $39.50. Eleven essays (and one generous bibliography on various critical responses by Clifford Mead) are here gathered to elucidate, clarify, and analyze Mr. Pynchon’s long fifth novel, the reveries in an eighteenth-century style of Rev’d Wicks Cherrycoke, an aging British parson who twenty years before had accompanied Mason and Dixon hacking their east-west line to mark the separation of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Several wonderfully elaborated essays: Arthur Saltzman’s well-reasoned “Cranks of Ev’ry Radius,” which documents the optimistic linearity of the novel; Donald Greiner’s insightful “Thomas Pynchon and the Fault Lines of America,” which points out that Mason and Dixon are both “New World Adams [as in Eve] who pushed westward yet find not an Edenic paradise or a soiled hell but both”; and David Seed’s “Mapping the Course of Empire in the New World,” which regards surveying matters; and Joseph Dewey’s “The Sound of One Man Mapping,” quite brilliant on Pynchon and “balance.” Much grad school gobbledygook elsewhere, hypertextual frenzifying, like Irving Malin’s “Foreshadowing the Text,” in which, like a raddled entomologist documenting ant-farm behavior, he makes nine journal entries over nine days, earnestly (and artlessly) telescoping on certain words (“Notice that the word ‘slap’ introduces, if only somewhat briefly, the idea of violence”) and little themes. At one point, in one of his great pedantic glosses regarding snowballs, he notes: “There is a kind of circularity here.” Um. Yuh. [Alexander Theroux]

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