Drawing A Line In Pynchon's Work: Mason & Dixon Is Long, But Unsatisfying.

The Good: Good dialog, interesting characters
The Bad: Far too convoluted in plot, long and feels long
The Basics: Hard to stomach in length and long stretches of uninteresting plot-work. Not as good as his other novels or characters.


Mason & Dixon is a big book, there's no other way to say it. It's thick, it's heavy, the plot which should be simple - the tale of famed explorer/cartographers Mason and Dixon charting their important dividing line - turns out to be anything but and the characters are well rounded and quite thoroughly explored.

Somewhere between his last novel and Mason & Dixon Thomas Pynchon fell more in love with dialog, for this novel has a noticeable increase in people actually talking to each other (as opposed to, say, Vineland where the bulk of talking is actually people spinning hugely long stories to one another).

That said, he also discovered an even more unique dialect than he's had in his previous novels and it would be nice if his characters were saying something to each other that we, the readers, could understand! Dixon speaks often incomprehensibly and it is a serious detraction to the novel. To add to the problem, the narrator occasionally speaks in dialect and it is unclear who that is.

More than simply being about Mason and Dixon, the novel is about the eclectic people they meet as they are surveying and cutting their line across the country. They're an interesting enough bunch, but not so much as to warrant the volume of this novel. Cameos include colonists such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

The first section of the novel deals with Mason and Dixon charting around the Cape of Good Hope and it's a confusing section. That is to say, in the first portion of the novel, it's difficult to tell what is actually occurring. The plot there is obscured and simple actions are obscured in heavy dialog.

This is a problem in that by the time Mason and Dixon actually make it to North America to begin cutting their swath across the continent, the reader is bored and flat out confused.

It's a difficult novel, even for a Pynchon fan and it's not anywhere near as imaginative or enlightening as his other works. Gravity's Rainbow rocks in terms of lyrical quality, V. tells an interesting story, and Vineland has great characters that resonate even long after you've read it. Mason & Dixon isn't any of those things. It's still better than most of the crap on the bookshelves today, but it's not the superlative work that we've come to expect from Pynchon.

For other works by Thomas Pynchon, please check out my reviews of:
The Crying Of Lot 49
Slow Learner
Gravity's Rainbow
Vineland
Inherent Vice

4.5/10

For other novel reviews, please be sure to check out my index page by clicking here!

© 2010, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


| | |