Mason & Dixon

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
Thomas Pynchon is the author of "V.," "The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner" (a collection of stories), and "Vineland." He received the National Book Award for "Gravity's Rainbow "in 1974. He lives in New York.
A "New York Times" Best Book of the Year
A "Time" Magazine Best Book of the Year
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as told by the celebrated contemporary novelist Thomas Pynchon, in an updated 18th-century saga featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies both erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse.
Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason and Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America, and back to England; into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives; through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, and tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.
Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese "feng shui" master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, wholly mismatched pair--Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic--pursue a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing (and managing to participate in) the many and varied occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring . . . A book that testifies to Pynchon's powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller."--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"A dazzling work of imaginative re-creation, a marvel-filled historical novel . . . Exceptionally funny."--Michael Dirda, "The Washington Post Book World "
"The style is playful, a pastiche redolent of the musty journal and the capitalomania of the day, bumptiously Fieldingesque, and yet as pumped-up and heightened and chock-full of late-20th-century references as the dernier cri from the street. It is wonderfully subversive. In fact, almost all the book's humor is balanced on the razor edge of anachronism, creating a rich stew of accepted and invented history, anecdote, myth and hyperbole. There are precedents here--John Barth, Robert Coover, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, E.L. Doctorow and, of course, the Thomas Pynchon of "Gravity's Rainbow" and "V.""--T. Coraghessan Boyle, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected."--Harold Bloom, " Bostonia "
"It is the vision itself that one takes away from this remarkable book: a wilderness America, peopled as much by European hopes and longings as by the interlocking kingdoms of the indigenous; a virgin, undivided land. Until, one morning, two ordinary men appear, charged with cutting a perfectly straight line, eight yards wide, westward into its heart . . . It is a moment of surpassing beauty and sadness, a glimpse of something whose sense we can never take for granted or be lastingly done with--even when, as here, it has occasioned a masterpiece."--Ted Mooney, "Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review"
"With "Mason & Dixon" we're again in the generous hands of one of American literature's true masters."--Rick Moody, "The Atlantic Monthly "
"An astonishing and wonderful book."--"The New York Review of Books"
"Splendid . . . "Mason & Dixon"--like "Huckleberry Finn," like "Ulysses"--is one of the great novels about friendship in anybody's literature."--John Leonard, "The Nation"
""Mason & Dixon" is an amazing achievement, certainly the novel of the year, possibly the novel of our time."--Robert L. McLaughlin, "Review of Contemporary Fiction"
"Awash with light and charm, rich with suggestion and idea, stuffed with the minutiae of another time and world. "Mason & Dixon" is less a book to read through than to read in, to savor paragraph by paragraph."--Paul Skenazy, "San Francisco Chronicle"
""Mason & Dixon" will make you want to curse American history, then turn around and bless it, because nowhere else but America would you find a zany literary genius like Thomas Pynchon."--Malcolm Jones, Jr., "Newsweek "
"As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces. This almost feels like the last great fiction of our dying era. Though I'm sure it won't be, I must admire its sense of the bright farewell, the clear passing overseas of the torch that Peacock, Dickens, Lawrence, and Conrad bore. You'll not find a better, this next time around."--John Fowles, "The Spectator "
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