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Review [published September 1997]
Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon
David B. Livingstone
Brevity, the aphorism has it, is the soul of wit. So
where does that leave Thomas Pynchon, whose current
offering Mason & Dixon weighs in at close to
800 pages – and of often-impenetrable stylized ‘Old
English’ text, no less?
The real Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,
America’s original sub-dividers, took upon themselves
the promethean task of imposing the first trace of order
upon the wilderness that was the new world, drawing
their famous line demarcating north and south. With
his fanciful re-imagining of Messrs Mason and Dixon,
Pynchon has created a veritable universe, similarly bewildering
and untamed, for readers to divide and conquer
if they can. Mason & Dixon is a sprawling muddle
of historical fact, surreal fancy, fable, fantasy, and occasional
silliness, underpinned by the quiet insistence –
supported, at times, more by faith than evidence – that
somehow it all can make sense; that somehow, given
enough courage, dogged determination, or blind luck,
order can be either alchemically divined from chaos or
forced upon it. Like American civilization, both past
and present.
BUY Thomas Pynchon books online from and
Pynchon’s always been the poster boy for literate
obsessive-compulsives; to have successfully navigated
his Gravity’s Rainbow, with its (literally!) hundreds
of characters and multiple opaque, labyrinthine approximations
of plot, has long been considered a badge
of honour in college English departments, as tons of
well-thumbed paperback copies littering coffeehouses
and the ‘used’ shelves of college bookstores attest to.
To read Pynchon is considered in some quarters akin
to membership in an elite, semi-secret society of codebreakers
or decipherers of hieroglyphics, a courageous
and maybe half-mad cult obsessed with ‘getting it’.
Their patron Saint Thomas has never made it easy;
the enigmatic, likely pseudonymous author remains as
much a mystery as his books, having refused all interviews,
rebutted all requests for biographical information,
and successfully eluded the most dogged attempts
at unearthing his true identity ever since his 50s debut.
Evidently in agreement with Humphrey Bogart that all
he owes his audience is a good performance, the ephemeral
Tom will periodically emerge from the shadows in
the form of another cryptic tome to dazzle with verbal
410
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