Mason & Dixon: A Novel (ISBN 0805058370)

Amazon.com Review:
A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow.

remedy for insomnia:
OH MY GOD HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE SO BORING? I found a nice hard back version in a bargain bin somewhere for $6. Picked it up, took it home. Every time I put it down, I had to check my pulse. Now I know why it was only $6.

Wow. Fantastick...eeh!:
Pynchon's my all-time favorite, but this big paperback has sat on my shelf for years. I am so glad to have finally gotten around to tackling this jaw-dropping masterwork. Perhaps I should wait until I've actually finished it (presently about 3/4 through), but I am enjoying the Ride so much I had to enthuse. Pynchon is a freakin genius. Other reviewers have mentioned some of the comic set-pieces--getting stoned with Col. Washington, the talking English Dog, Felipe the elecric eel and his backup marimba band, etc., but every little detail is sheer delight. The beverage-themed goofy names (Cherrycoke, Redzinger), the historical detail (thanks, 'kipedia!), the stories within stories within stories...wow. One of my favorite little touches: the black-clad young woman from Brooklyn who uses "as" in the way her counterparts in the present day use "like." This is a feast of language, so much fun I almost don't care about its deeper meaning. Which, I do not doubt, lurks there for future "smoaking."

Wow!:
Stunning. Possibly the pinnacle of writing. A moving work with riches to be found on so many levels. Gorgeous writing and an enjoyable read. However, the writing is very difficult, the story is all over the place, and it is very long. Work your way up to this book, take your time reading it, and you won't be disappointed! An incredible journey and adventure.

I Suppose I'm Glad I Read It...:
I received this book as a gift from my (then) wife. She knows that, as an engineer, I am very interested in the famous and not-so-famous engineers and technicians who helped build our modern world. Mason and Dixon were two such, so a book about them should have been of interest to me. In that respect, the gift was a failure. The author has, to paraphrase Mark Twain, thrown so much darkness on the subject that we shall soon know nothing about it. If there is good, accurate and cogent information about the historical Mason and Dixon in this book, you'd need another ten books to tease it out. I'm not sure I'd ever recognize the real Mason and Dixon if presented them, after this introduction. But if you put aside any hope of discerning fact from fiction, the book has its own fascinating charm. Mason and Dixon are not as important as the world they inhabit. It isn't a world you'll recognize, not unless you learned your history from reading The National Enquirer. But it at least gives you an insight into what the pre-Revolutionary world may have been like before the historians cleaned it up, edited it, and corrected its grammar. Our modern lunacies and misconceptions have their antecedents. Boy do they ever. I doubt I'll ever read another book by Thomas Pynchon. For one thing, I don't think I'll ever want to spend that much time again. But I'm glad to have read it once and read it through to the end. It has expanded my understanding of what literature can be.

A marathon, not a sprint:
I picked up "Mason and Dixon" (a marvelously fat tome that has heft. That's the main reason I bought it actually) at a used book sale this year, and I recently read (Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina & Richard Farina) he was a college mate of Richard Farina who was married to Joan Baez's sister Mimi, and hung with Dylan and Joan (Farnia did, not Pynchon, who apparently is quite a recluse and would only do interviews by fax). Purportedly a fictionalized account of Mason and Dixon the "geomancers" who surveyed and marked the MD/PA boundary, but composed of long sections of fantasy and fancy that must have no referencable basis, the book does include historical references that checked out on Wikipedia. The book includes a talking dog, a French-made duck automaton, twins named Pitt and Pliny so named because no one remembers who came out first so each can claim to be "The Elder" and "The Younger", and occasional musical interludes (with stage directions). But for all the silliness, the book is a compelling, if marathonickal (773 densely written pages) account that has the feeling of authenticity of feeling, and of description of the strangeness and openness (even chaos) of the American continent in the years between the French and Indian wars and the incipient Revolution. Pynchon references the distant and immediate past and the incipient and further future, with glancing and telling references to the dividing line between North and South, between slaves and wage-earners, that would mark the bitter boundary along which the Civil War would be fought. And all told in flowing style, with puns and "joaks" sprinkled liberally throughout. With recognition of its character as a marathon, not a sprint, this Pynchon is well worth the race.