I’ve owned a copy of Mason & Dixon for a very long time but never had a strong urge to pick it up, in large part because I had intended to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow as my first major Pynchon work (I read The Crying of Lot 49 a while ago, but it is, in its slight hundred or so pages, scarcely Pynchonian in breadth, if comparable in density). But, for whatever reason, I was looking for something meaty and Mason & Dixon seemed the more attractive option.
The story is ostensibly a fictionalized account of Charles Mason and Jeremiah' Dixon’s journey to chart their eponymous line to resolve a border dispute between Pennsylvania in Maryland. But simply calling it “a fictionalized account” is misleading, as it suggests at most some narrative tidying and invention of secondary characters to make a more cohesive and rounded story. A better description would be to say it takes the story of Mason and Dixon and some of the founding myths of pre-Revolutionary America and tosses them in a blender with about 20 blotters of LSD. The “fictionalized” elements aren’t simply things that didn’t happen (chance meetings with Washington and Benjamin Franklin, for instance), but things that are outright supernatural. There’s an invisible robot duck that’s in love with a Frenchman, a conversation between two clocks, a field of gigantic vegetables (think James and the Giant Peach big), and a talking dog, among other things.
These elements are jumbled together by a frame narrator named Reverend Cherrycoke, who interjects regularly with his own supposition and is interrupted by his niece and nephew. The story veers regularly off course, and there are few signposts to guide you through dialogue or indicate when one scene blends into another, which they do regularly and with hedge maze circuity. The whole book feels like it was deliberately written to be as hard to follow as possible without descending into outright gibberish. Pynchon toes that line deftly, though to call it a pleasurable read would be a stretch. This is a book that wants to be a workout, and while certain passages and images are rewarding, I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what had happened in any given chapter.
Pynchon is a noted stylist, and his writing in this book deftly apes the sound and texture of 18th century prose, complete with esoteric Capitalization and antique verbosity. His humor is pleasantly modern, though its occasional crudity is actually in line with the period it is trying to evoke (recall that the Western Canon’s proto-novel, Don Quixote, includes a scene where Sancho Ponza takes a sneaky dump off the side of his horse, and another where he and Quixote vomit into each others’ faces). I wouldn’t say I enjoyed reading this book, at least not all the time, but I’m glad I read it.
And one day, I really will tackle Gravity’s Rainbow.