Suggestions (Gale Online 6 - M.&D.)

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Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

    In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon weaves together fact with a kind of
logical fantasy derived in various measures from fact, probability, and
imagination to create what amounts to an allegory of national progress
in the formative years of the United States. Narrated in
authentic-sounding period prose by the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, the novel
follows the journey of the surveyors who divided the country into North
and South, from their first meeting until the drawing of the famous line
which bears their name. Like the rest of Pynchon's work, Mason & Dixon
is long, dense, and difficult. Even a sympathetic reviewer like Michiko
Kakutani in the New York Times admits that the novel "could have used
some judicious editing" to prevent its being "daunting to many readers."
Most critics, Kakutani included, are fascinated by Pynchon's complex
narrative tapestry. T. Coraghessan Boyle, in the New York Times Book
Review, states: "The method is sublime. It allows for the surveyors'
story to become an investigation into the order of the universe,
clockwork deity and all, and yet at the same time to reflect the
inadequacy of reason alone to explain the mystery that surrounds us. The
haunted world, the suprareal, the ghostly and the impossible have the
same valence as the facts of history as we receive them. If the
traditional historical novel attempts to replicate a way of life, speech
and costume, [this] post-modernist version seeks only to be just that, a
version." In the Nation, John Leonard notes that "from the depths of a
jaunty disenchantment, [Pynchon] calls into brilliant question the very
ways we measure, map and misconstrue history, landscape, time, space,
stars and self."

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.