A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow.


From Library Journal
The publication of Pynchon's fifth novel is certain to be a highlight of the literary year. To try and summarize it would be an exercise in futility. Like his previous works, this one is complex?much more than a simple, rollicking tale of 18th-century surveyors as they wend their way south (to the Cape of Good Hope) and west (to America, where they drew the line for which they will ever be famous?the boundary that came to define North and South). Indeed, it is this line, this artificial border, that lies at the heart of the novel. When Mason confides to Captain Zhang that the unremitting forest disturbs him, his exotic companion replies that given that Adam and Eve, Buddha and Newton were all enlightened while sitting beneath trees, "A quick review would suggest that Trees produce Enlightenment. Trees are not the Problem. The Forest is not an Agent of Darkness. But it may be your Visto [line] is. ...Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a line." This belief in the danger of artificial boundaries?be they political, literary, or philosophical?is reflected in the very structure of Pynchon's novels, in his efforts not to let "rules" get in the way of what it is he is trying to say. His novel is often poetic, sometimes tedious, and occasionally arcane. The digressions may temporarily confuse, but the humor is sure to amuse (even Star Trek gets a nod). More accessible than Gravity's Rainbow, this is still not a novel to be read quickly. It is a work that grows on one, and as the reader follows from tree to tree, a forest truly does begin to emerge?with an important message for our "scientific" age. From one of the most unique, thoughtful, and challenging of contemporary authors, a work that is essential for every public and academic library.-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, T. Coraghessan Boyle
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, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, E.L. Doctorow and, of course, the Thomas Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow and V.


Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring...a book that testifies to Pynchon's remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Ted Mooney
...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.


From Booklist
Pynchon, an elusive, erudite, and manic satirist, has weighed in with another big book, another romp through the wild frontier of his imagination. As he did in his most celebrated work, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and in Vineland (1990), Pynchon explores the paradoxes of a transitional era, this time harking back to the mid^-eighteenth century and the so-called Age of Reason. His heroes are the English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the men responsible for establishing the Mason-Dixon line, and who, in his magic-making hands, embody their time's eager devotion to logic and precision even in the face of life's daunting chaos. As Pynchon chronicles their cultural and scientific adventures from their first meeting in London through their journey to Sumatra and the arduous surveying of the famous boundary line that carries their names, he considers such complex issues as colonization, slavery, the massacre of American Indians, and the conflicts between religion and science. But he also has fun, gleefully improvising on the assertive language of the time, taking sly liberties with the lives and personalities of the melancholy Mason and carefree Dixon, reveling in the buzz of pubs and coffeehouses, and animating a great cast of whimsical secondary characters. While Mason and Dixon survive all manner of extremes in weather, terrain, and human behavior, Pynchon transforms their world into a fun-house-mirror reflection of our own, reminding us that we still search for meaning in celestial events, that racism is still alive and virulent, and that friendship and love can and do transcend the dividing lines of prejudice and politics. Donna Seaman


Review
"Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement...the novel of our time." --Robert L. McLaughlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Mason & Dixon--like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses--is one of the great novels about friendship in anybody's literature."--John Leonard, The Nation

"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



The New York Review of Books
An astonishing and wonderful book.


Review
"Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement...the novel of our time." --Robert L. McLaughlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"Mason & Dixon--like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses--is one of the great novels about friendship in anybody's literature."--John Leonard, The Nation

"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



Book Description
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.



About the Author
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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The novelist who brought us The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow reimagines the 18th-century lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, featuring Native Americans, frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies, and major caffeine abuse.

ANNOTATION

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that has come to be known as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here the "National Book Award"-winning author of "Gravity's Rainbow" imagines their story in an updated 18th-century novel featuring Native Americans, frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Fowles

As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces. -- John Fowles, The Spectator

C. Boyle

This the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. Mason & Dixon is a ground-breaking book, a book of heart and fire and humor, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except maybe V., in Gravity's Rainbow. -- The New York Times Book Review

Coraghessan T. Boyle

This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. "Mason & Dixon" is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except Maybe "V." and "Gravity's Rainbow." -- T. Coraghessan Boyle, The New York Times Book Review

Michiko Kakutani

A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring...a book that testifies to Pynchon's remarkable powers of invention and the sheer power of storytelling. -- The New York Times

John Fowles