Meet the New World, Same as the Old World: A Review

[Dkipen at aol.com]

In a message dated 97-05-12 18:48:06 EDT, doktor at primenet.com writes:

<< let me take a poll here: if you could recommend _just
 one_ review of M&D, which would it be?   >>

Oh, so it's a contest? Now you tell me. So much for false modesty -- I can
hold back no longer, and my review follows below.

Best,
David


America's Own Line: Surveying "Mason & Dixon"

	Thomas Pynchon can't even write a linear novel about the Mason-Dixon 
Line.
	His first novel, "V." (1963), was shaped like the 22nd letter of the modern 
English alphabet, with two parallel narratives half a century apart
converging, 
Euclid be damned, in a waterspout off Malta in 1919. "The Crying of Lot 49" 
(1966) suggested more of an asterisk, a short, six-chaptered starburst of
invention 
that mocked the footnotes with which academia was already beginning to
festoon 
Pynchon's fiction.
	"Gravity's Rainbow" (1973), routinely called the best American novel of 
everything from the decade (per the stingy) to the century,  left its key by
the 
door, disclosing its structure right in the title. It's a rainbow, a
parabola, the same 
one traveled by the V-2 rocket launched in its first chapter, and by the
doomsday 
missile about to strike Los Angeles in its last. "Vineland" (1990) assumed
just 
about the oldest shape in fiction: a love triangle, in this case hanging off
a 
chuckwagon at breakfast and beaten loudly, so as to rouse America * Pynchon's

perennial subject, more explicitly with each succeeding book * from its
nodding, 
post-1960s doze.
	A "V," an asterisk, a parabola,  a triangle * not a straight line in the 
bunch. Punchlines, not straight ones, have always been Pynchon's stock in
trade. 
His newest book, "Mason & Dixon" * a masterpiece, by the way * is 
desperately serious, yet even the very best comic novels are as dirges next
to it.
	"Mason & Dixon" reconstructs the story of the two Englishmen * the 
former a melancholy professional astronomer lost in the stars, his partner an

earthbound surveyor * contracted to run a boundary westward between the 
colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland in the 1760s. This was harder than it 
sounds, as the monarchy had generously granted some of  the same land to both

the Calverts of Maryland and Pennsylvania's Penns. Mason and Dixon succeeded 
where several others had failed, but their success became America's tragedy, 
prefiguring the divisiveness of a civil war that Appomattox only interrupted.
	The novel falls into three sections. The first,  "Latitudes and Departures,"

tells of Mason and Dixon's first meeting and slow friendship on a royal
expedition 
to the southern hemisphere in 1761. There they observe and record the
"transit of 
Venus," a kind of eclipse in which that planet passes in front of the sun.
When 
compared with other such observations taken around the world, their
calculations 
help to measure the earth's distance from the sun, demystifying the heavens
and 
ushering in the Age of Reason. 
	The third section,  "Last Transit," chronicles their final wanderings, 
separately and together, as they confront not just a second transit of Venus
in 
1769, but their own transits from this life into the doubtful next. 
	In between stands the middle passage, by far the longest and called, with 
linear directness, "America." In other words, "Mason & Dixon" resembles less
a 
straight line than a luncheon snack, as a minor character divines
immediately: 
"When (Mason and Dixon) come to explain about the two Transits of Venus, and 
the American Work filling the Years between, 'By heavens, a "Sandwich,"'
cries 
Mr. Edgewise."
	The Earl himself doesn't appear in this sandwich-shaped novel, but just 
about all his 18th-century contemporaries in the not-just-English-speaking
world 
do, including then-Colonel George Washington; a sinister, Promethean Ben 
Franklin; and "a tall red-headed youth" never directly identified as Thomas 
Jefferson. Dr. Samuel Johnson and his youthful ward James Boswell put in an 
appearance late in the proceedings as well, and even a squinty mariner with a

weakness for spinach rates a cameo.
	The list, like the novel, does go on. Limitations of space, memory and 
erudition all forbid an exhaustive catalog of the book's contents. More than
any 
line or sandwich, "Mason & Dixon" resembles the wondrous carriage by which 
our heroes travel in one episode: "Our Coach is a late invention of the
Jesuits, 
being, to speak bluntly, a Conveyance, wherein the inside is quite noticeably

larger than the outside, though the fact cannot be appreciated until one is
inside."
	This proto-holodeck is a favorite image with Pynchon, who returns to it 
not 50 pages later to describe a remote cabin where they "find more room
inside 
than could possibly be contained in the sorrowing ruin they believ'd they
were 
entering."
	Unlike the coach and the cabin, the 773-page "Mason & Dixon" looks 
plenty big even on the outside. But to house the bottomless wealth of  ideas 
hatching inside, an entire library would appear impossibly small. 
	One of Pynchon's best ideas may have been his first one. "Mason & 
Dixon's" achievement begins with Pynchon's discovery of an historical subject

commensurate not only with his twin obsessions -- America and science -- but 
with his anger at the mess that greed has made of them both. 
	Pynchon's work, ironically for someone so long misfiled under science-
fiction, has always focused on his excavation of the past. Perhaps the whole
point 
of writing a historical novel such as "Mason & Dixon" is to find some
overlooked 
turning point behind us. At the height of the Age of Reason, which bequeathed
us 
not only a country but the wisdom it took to ruin it, Pynchon finds the
setting of 
his dreams.
	The period also affords him endless opportunities for language play -- not 
exactly Pynchon's weak suit to begin with. Ever the ventriloquist, Pynchon
throws 
his voice a distance of two centuries, and it comes whizzing back like a 
boomerang with the strangest English on it you've ever heard. Teenage girls
say 
"I'm, as, 'maz'd," when of course what they mean is "I'm, like, wow." "Cheap 
shot," Mason tries to say when Dixon insults his attire, only it comes out 
"Inexpensive salvo."
	Goofy? You bet. Pynchon's got the stately 18th-century diction down cold, 
but he splices it together with his own idiosyncratic style to produce a
hybrid that 
moves at the very speed of thought. 
	More effort's been expended over the years in praising Pynchon's prose 
than in actually describing it, and that's unfortunate. Most reviews of his
work 
concentrate on its surrealistic aspects -- the "hallucinatory, pyrotechnic, 
phantasmagorical" school of adjective-stuffed, blurb-ready criticism. Commas
are 
very big with these people. 
	More and more, though, the defining quality of Pynchon's voice strikes me 
as, of all things, understatement. Listen to him early on, detailing the way
certain 
dockside denizens of Philadelpia "have pass'd the Morning perfecting before 
pocket mirrors images of guilelessness." Without ever coming out and calling 
them pickpockets -- though the specification of "pocket" mirrors sneaks in a 
subliminal hint -- Pynchon almost casually nails the scene.
	Time and again these signature circumlocutions yield long sentences that 
fairly beg to be read aloud. But that would spoil the visual pleasure of
seeing all 
the trappings of a vanished English resurrected, like Mason and Dixon 
themselves, from undeserved obscurity: the capitalized Nouns; the commas,
that 
introduce dependent clauses,-- and the comma-dash combos that writer
Nicholson 
Baker has styled "commashes."
	Of course, Pynchon capitalizes nouns except when he doesn't in "Mason & 
Dixon," and even less consistently as he goes along. This may strike some as 
carelessness, but there's another way to read it: as an index of how the Age
of 
Reason was steadily overtaking "an Age of Faith, when Miracles still
literally 
happen'd." What better way for Pynchon to memorialize the mapmakers' victory 
over the Indians' pantheism -- which saw divinity all around them -- than 
gradually to decapitalize the world, leaving us all a nation disconsolately
lower-
case? 
	So, is there anything wrong with "Mason & Dixon"? Well, the dust 
jacket's a mite annoying. It's two jackets, really: one a very attractice
inner sleeve; 
the other, one of those clear plastic outer sleeves that make almost all
copies of 
Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" look, just a few years after publication,
like 
inadvertently laundered collar stays. Better to have spent the design money
on a 
nice, useful map of Maryland and Pennsylvania for the endpapers.
	"Mason & Dixon" will be nobody's idea of an easy read, either. "Gravity's 
Rainbow" has been called, one hopes wrongly, the least read bestseller of all
time, 
and it would be an easily avoidable shame if "Mason & Dixon" suffered the
same 
fate, since a simple trip to the library yields all the provisions a hardy
reader 
ought to need. 
	A reading of Dava Sobel's award-winning short nonfiction book 
"Longitude" would make a concise introduction to some of the science "Mason &

Dixon" takes for granted. As for Pynchon's gloriously complex style, the 
magnificent 1964 short story "The Secret Integration" (found in his 1984 
collection "Slow Learner") has always offered the best bunny slope on which
to 
find one's footing, before tackling the novelistic alps that lie beyond. Pack
a 
sturdy dictionary for "Mason & Dixon," too -- the older the better -- to keep
up 
with the best vocabulary in literature this side of Pynchon's old Cornell
prof 
Vladimir Nabokov.
	Why go to all this trouble? Why not go pick up some other, easier book, 
one you don't need a decoder ring to enjoy? I can only answer firsthand that 
Pynchon's  is writing worth the work, fiction that can change, even save,
lives. 
	There may always persist a certain signal-to-noise ratio with regard to the 
most challenging fiction. There may always be passages we don't quite get, or

think we don't, the first time through. But my noise may be your signal, and
on the 
next page vice versa, and with Pynchon even the noise is unmistakable as a 
snowflake's fingerprint, and the signal, when it returns, a revelation.
	Just such a revelation occurs in "Mason & Dixon" when the duo and their 
motley camp followers adjourn for the winter, and Mason heads north to take
in a 
"Broad-Way" show. He enjoys it well enough, but when a promised but never 
quite expected elephant actually materializes before the second-act curtain,
"The 
audience sit stunn'd in the vacuous Purity of not having been cheated."
"Mason & 
Dixon" will win Thomas Pynchon more raves and more readers, and maybe more 
awards than even he can turn down, and all for "the vacuous Purity of not
having 
been cheated."

	Malibu-based writer David Kipen (Dkipen at aol.com) is senior editor of Buzz 
magazine.