(Henry Holt. $27.50) sprawls over three continents and half the 18th century. Its central narrative is factual. In 1764 two Englishmen, the astronomer Charles Mason and the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, were hired by the Royal Society to settle the boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The job took five years, but we still feel its effects. Ten years before the Revolution, Mason and Dixon sawed the country in two.
North and South, slave states and free states: the import of what the two men formalized was recognized instantly. Pynchon’s genius is to use the line as a starting point, the place where America’s deepest characteristics–violence, restlessness–and contradictions–slaveholding vs. freedom-loving–came into sharp focus. And while he decorates his main plot with high-spirited yarns about everything from a talking dog to a feng shui master, the levity never quite hides this novel’s tragic heart. Near the end, Dixon bemoans the fact that slaves suffer worldwide, then cries, “America was the one place we should not have found them.” That sentence stops you cold and leaves you shivering.
Pynchon fans will find the familiar delights. There are the oddball names (Wicks Cherrycoke, Vrou Vroom). Paranoia abounds (who wants this line, the East India Company? the Jesuits?). There are inside jokes (the first line, “Snow-Balls have flown their arcs. ..,” echoes the first line of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “A screaming comes across the sky…”) and shamelessly dumb jokes (Mason and Dixon smoking dope with George Washington).
But despite the usual load of literary sass, this is a very different Pynchon. “Mason & Dixon” has far more heart than his other novels. The scene in which the melancholic Mason is visited by the ghost of his late wife is both hair-raising and heart-breaking, and there is no better modern portrait of heroism than the moment when Dixon tears a bloody whip from a slave auctioneer’s hand. “Mason & Dixon” will make you want to curse American history, then turn around and bless it, because nowhere else but America could you find a zany literary genius like Thomas Pynchon.
