The 18th century as a living entity never quite emerges, even if ideas and fancies about it abound. Brilliant as it often is in both design and detail, Mason & Dixon afforded me less pleasure than any Pynchon novel to date, perhaps because the imagination that might have melded it all into a vision seems to be working at half the intensity such a farrago requires. But the evidence after a first reading is that the same paradoxical, all-American anti- intellectualism that has often empowered Pynchon in the past to ride roughshod over decorum has finally caught up with him and become a kind of trap –- even a kind of escape-clause for his seriousness.
It’s surely too soon to post final verdicts about a novel that reportedly was almost a quarter of a century in the making. So it stands to reason that this epic about American origins, focused on a couple of low-level line drawers (the 18th century executors of the Mason-Dixon Line), winds up favoring sprawl over progression, digression over linear advance. Fusing studied literary pastiche with collegiate humor and flip song lyrics, philosophical soul-searching with barroom brawls and locker-room asides, Pynchon’s intricate and unwieldy narratives tend to define and confound boundaries in the same gesture. V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, the stories in Slow Learner, Vineland, and now Mason & Dixon synthesize an awesome array of scientific and historical speculation while steadily sabotaging, with a compulsive anti-elitism, every effort to marshal this material into the stuff of high art. It’s always been one of the paradoxes of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction that he combines the encyclopedic researches of a polymath with the rude instincts of a populist. This review originally appeared in the Jissue of In These Times.
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