Mason & Dixon
Charles Mason, an astronomer, and Jeremiah Dixon, a surveyor, are sent to draw the boundary line that would come to carry their names across colonial America. Pynchon frames their commission as a tale told in 1786 by the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke to his family on a winter evening, and stretches it back across the decades before the Revolution. The whole of it, seven hundred pages and more, is written in a pastiche of eighteenth-century English, archaic spelling and midsentence Capitals included.
The style is the wall. Every one of its seven-hundred-odd pages imitates eighteenth-century English, the capitalized Nouns and period spelling and long digressive sentences, so you read it at the pace of the century it mimics. Some find the voice enchanting and some find it a slog; almost nobody finds it fast. This is not the Pynchon to start with, and at this length a false start costs you weeks.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
