I also quickly discovered how much my poor cerebral synapses had missed Pynchon's patented mix of highjinks, metaphysics, and penumbras I could feel all kinds of unused parts of my brain firing up again as paradoxes were posed and allusions and analogies multiplied on every page.īut I also noticed that the book's humor was more thoroughly interwoven with melancholy and a sense of mortality than ever before in Pynchon's work. Not only was the humor irresistible, making me remember how much I'd enjoyed encountering the bad song lyrics or following that ricocheting aerosol can in the second chapter of 49. Once I began reading Mason and Dixon I could not put it down for long. At any rate, I bought the book soon after summer vacation began and read its first pages in a subterranean coffee shop in Philadelphia (without yet realizing how appropriate such a setting would be). Perhaps it was that I heard that in Mason Pynchon had created his greatest straight man, in Dixon his liveliest comic hero. Perhaps it was the rumored portraits of colonial America, especially Philadelphia, near where I live. Perhaps it was its subjects, Enlightenment science and the contradictions in American democracy that came to be marked by Mason and Dixon's famous line. In the summer of 1997 a force like a gravitational field drew me to reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon. pure Space waits the Surveyor,- no previous Lines, no fences, no streets to constrain polygony however extravagant,- angles pushing outward and inward,- all Sides zigging and zagging, going ahead and doubling back, making Loops inside Loops,- in America, 'twas ever, Poh! to Simple Quadrilaterals.'

'There is a love of complexity here in America.

Thomas pynchon mason and dixon