Mason & Dixon

Name: Mason & Dixon
Author: Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon · 1997

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 case against

on the jokes
“A farting priest who’s quick with learned puns is his idea of hilarity.”
Walter Kirn · Slate, 1997
on the length
“a 773 page morass of archaic vernacular”
one star · a book blog
on the reading pace
“I tried limiting myself to ten pages a day”
Bob Levin · Broad Street Review, 2012
on the picaresque structure
“Much of the story seems to be going nowhere, in true picaresque fashion”
a book blog