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.
"Lost me at the talking dog, and never recovered." The whimsy tips into juvenilia for a lot of readers, one naming the moment credibility broke: "George Washington smoking pot and getting the munchies?" The pastiche never clicks for them either, a "773 page morass of archaic vernacular" where "the prose is wonky, and for me, unreadable." The survey that gives the book its title runs as background noise beneath digressions into the Paxton Boys, calendar reform, and ley lines that the text declines to explain. Minor characters arrive by the dozen and vanish. Readers ration it a few pages a day, treating a novel as homework.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
