Review: Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Honestly need more time to dwell on/revisit this one (I have a backlog of essays I want to read on this lol). But initial thoughts:

I was drawn to read this one first over Pynchon's other books on account of the subject matter: the charting of the Mason-Dixon line, today known as that weirdly straight line that now marks the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The parts of this book that actually deal with that and the long trek into the heart of the American country; the tense encounters with local tribes and colonial slaveowners; Mason and Dixon's philosophical differences and their intereactions; those segments were the most engrossing for me.

And then you have a talking dog (who makes you go wtf and then somehow touches your heart when he shows up again 600 pages later). And a revenge-seeking sentient animatronic duck. And George Washington getting high on home-grown pot with the main characters while his wife serves munchies. And it's like I can't tell what's real and what's not anymore.

It's not as "difficult" to read as Gravity's Rainbow experientially speaking but that's not saying much if you've ever tried to read that book and know what it's like. Pynchon will continue to Pynchon with his random digressions that seem to go nowhere, only this time in a 18th century dialect and an Archaic Printing style that Randomly Capitalizes words like This (except wait the words that thematically matter are capitalized!). I appreciate the dedication and commitment, but seriously.

What it comes down to though is trying to capture what the Enlightenment was like experientially, in all its fantastical possibilities. And then you think about the absurdity that came about because of it. That the powers that be on the other side of the world (including the British East India Company) decided they could arbitrarily put down a straight line as a border subdividing land without accounting for the people who already lived across it (Middle East, anyone?), and that this line would have profound implications for the debates and livelihoods of folks affected by slavery, the Civil War, Native American displacement, among other things. And that moment near the end of their journey, when Dixon starts to realize this...

It all builds up to an experience that is larger than life, which I guess is maximalist bread and butter at this point.

To be honest at this point I am probably much more interested in reading articles about this book than immediately re-reading at the moment (a problem I find with a lot of other text heavy books these days) but I think I'll come back to it again someday. Merits a selective chapter re-read if anything.