Word: mason
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Ever since the appearance of Thomas Pynchon's epic, mind-bending Gravity's Rainbow (1973), rumors have circulated among the faithful that the elusive author was working on two new projects: a novel about Japanese monster movies and one dealing with the 18th century drawing of the Mason-Dixon line between the (then) colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Fragments of a Godzilla-like episode indeed appeared in Pynchon's Vineland (1990), and now here comes a real monster: Mason & Dixon (Henry Holt; 773 pages...
...else can kid around as brilliantly as Pynchon. Mason & Dixon bears some resemblances to Gravity's Rainbow. Both books are huge (the first edition of Gravity's Rainbow ran 760 pages). Both have truncated double dactyls (Duh-duh-duh Duh-duh) as titles. Both manifest Pynchon's trademark narrative rhythm, repeated segues from cartoonish pratfalls into surreal episodes of phantasmagoric dread, punctuated by periodic eruptions of songs or poems...
...difficult than its famously challenging predecessor. This time out, the author renounces contemporary English speech altogether and casts the entire narrative in the 18th century diction allegedly spoken by a clergyman named Wicks Cherrycoke; he is the one who tells aloud the tale of his one-time acquaintances Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79) over what must have been an incredibly long night in Philadelphia during the Christmas season of 1786. Cherrycoke is given to utterances such as the following: "The Pilgrim, however long or crooked his Road, may keep ever before him the Holy Place...
Such formal prose does not entirely squelch the sort of tomfooleries that Pynchon devotees so eagerly search out. When, for example, Mason takes offense at a remark by his partner, Dixon asks, "Tell me, what'd I say?" The anachronistic allusion to Ray Charles' future rock hit will tickle the cognoscenti. The book teems with other familiar Pynchonesque diversions: a talking dog that appears near the beginning and again near the end of the story; a four-ton cheese called "The Octuple Gloucester"; a journey by Mason to the inhabited center of the earth; cameo appearances by a number...
...whimsical inventiveness, Mason & Dixon is basically a historical re-creation of the known deeds of the astronomer Mason and the surveyor Dixon. The line did not constitute their first collaboration, and Pynchon devotes more than 250 pages to the work they did together before arriving in the New World to take up the job commissioned by the British Royal Society...