The New York Review of Books

Thomas Pynchon is the unlikely offspring of Jack Kerouac and the Cornell English department. He was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, in 1937. He attended Oyster Bay High School, and entered Cornell in 1953, majoring in engineering physics before switching to English. In 1955, he left college to serve for two years in the Navy. He was stationed, for part of that time, in Norfolk, Virginia, where he one day wandered into a bookstore and picked up a copy of the Evergreen Review. It was his first exposure to the Beat sensibility—”an eye-opener,” as he later described it.¹ He returned to Cornell in 1957, took a literature course with Vladimir Nabokov (who, when asked about it years later, did not remember him), and graduated in 1959.

At this point the trail becomes famously difficult to follow. After college Pynchon seems to have spent some time in New York City and then moved to Seattle, where, from 1960 to 1962, he worked for Boeing as a writer of technical material. He had published a relatively conventional short story, “The Small Rain,” in a Cornell literary magazine in 1959. Another story, “Low-lands,” exhibiting the Beat influence, appeared in New World Writing in 1960. The same year, the Kenyon Review published “Entropy.” It was quickly anthologized, it introduced the term “entropy” into everyday conversation, and it established the popular image of Pynchon as a writer of postmodernist high-tech, a literary encoder of scientific arcana.

Two dauntingly idiosyncratic novels, V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), followed, but by then Pynchon had disappeared entirely from public view. When his third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), won a National Book Award (it failed to get a Pulitzer after the trustees overturned a unanimous jury recommendation), the prize was accepted by the comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey, a specialist in pseudo-academic doubletalk who was apparently mistaken by some people in the audience for Pynchon himself. Since then, Pynchon has simply declined offers of awards for his work. His name occasionally turns up in unexpected contexts—last year, Esquire published his interview with the members of a rock band called Lotion—but his whereabouts have been mysterious, and the most recent photograph available is the one in the 1953 Oyster Bay High School yearbook.²

Authorial privacy cultivated to this degree tends to compound, rather than deflect, the problem of celebrity by turning ordinary fans into cultists—people who read the novels as encryptions of the author’s “message” and personal life. In Pynchon’s case, the natural tendency is to identify him with his typical protagonist, a social dropout who sets off with some vague notion of making sense of the flux and ends swallowed up by it, one more electron knocking about the universal molecule. Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil in the double-plotted V., Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, and Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow are incarnations of this figure, and they are all fairly identifiably the children of Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), a book Pynchon called “one of the great American novels.”³ They think they’re getting somewhere, they think they’re looking for someone, and then they realize they’re already where they want to be, the only place it makes any sense to be, which is on the road. They disappear, in effect, into the ozone, just as Pynchon seems to have done. These heroes belong to a distinctly late-Fifties literary type: they’re dharma bums—into popular tunes, communal drinking, dope when they can get it, casual sex, and the odd piece of Zen wisdom. A fifty-nine-year-old writer who emerges from the woodwork in order to interview a bunch of musicians in an obscure rock band (and wearing, the band reported, jeans and a Godzilla T-shirt) conforms to the type nicely.

The Beat influence (and Henry Miller) is responsible for the shaggy dog appearance of Pynchon’s narratives—the sense they give of avoiding resolution at all costs, of always being ready to introduce another eccentric character or to invent another surreal episode. But no one would mistake Gravity’s Rainbow for Kerouac. This is not only because Pynchon is an infinitely more versatile stylist than Kerouac—he is a Nabokovian virtuoso of miniature literary effects—but because he has coated the low-life picaresque form with an astonishingly thick patina of scientific information, historical detail, mythic allusion, and Joycean wordplay. On one level his stories slosh merrily along from one farcical-tragical episode to the next, while on another level an enormous web of symbolic implication is continually being woven and unwoven. It is as though the story of Popeye the Sailorman had fallen into the hands of Richard Wagner. This is, presumably, the effect of the Cornell genes in Pynchon’s literary inheritance, and it is what is responsible for his reputation as an esoteric writer, a novelist with a message which requires an advanced knowledge of thermodynamics, modern political history, Rilke, and the differential calculus to decode.

Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland, was published in 1990, seventeen years after Gravity’s Rainbow. The new novel, Mason & Dixon, appears only seven years later, but Pynchon is reported to have contracted to write the book back in 1973, so he has evidently been thinking about the project, at least, for almost twenty-five years. The novel is nearly as long as Gravity’s Rainbow (which is a very long book); it is written in a pastiche of eighteenth-century prose, studded with capitalizations, contractions, and archaic diction; and it is, as advertised, about the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the British astronomers who, between 1763 and 1767, established the southern boundary of Pennsylvania—the Mason-Dixon Line, which eventually named the border between the slave states and the free states.

The novel has, in proper eighteenth-century style, a narrator who poses as witness, editor, and historian. He is a slightly sententious, vaguely unreliable, rather sly old minister called Wicks Cherrycoke, who claims to have traveled with Mason and Dixon and who tells their story to assorted relatives (who freely interrupt him to carry on their own banter) in a Philadelphia family whom he is freeloading off during the Christmas season of 1786. His story begins in 1761, when Mason and Dixon embark on an official expedition to South Africa to observe the “transit of Venus”—the passage of the planet Venus between the earth and the sun. About a third of the book is taken up with this adventure and with Mason’s subsequent experiences doing astronomical work on the island of St. Helena; the rest concerns the business of establishing the eponymous Line, which involved first surveying the arc that now separates Delaware from Pennsylvania, and then the cutting, by a team of axmen, of an eight-yard-wide swath, or “Visto,” through 244 miles of wilderness on a straight latitudinal path from the Chesapeake Bay, over the Alleghenies, to the Ohio River. There are a few pages on the lives of the two men after 1767, and the book ends with their deaths.

As a story, the novel is as desultory as it sounds. It seems (on superficial inspection, but this sort of historical verisimilitude is Pynchon’s penchant) to stick faithfully to the biographies of the real-life Mason and Dixon and to the scientific details of their work and the work of the other astronomers who figure as characters—Nevil Maskelyne, who was indeed, as he appears here, Royal Astronomer and the brother-in-law of Clive of India; his predecessor and Mason’s patron, James Bradley, who was indeed the discoverer of the aberration of light (the distortion caused, when determining the position of a star, by the movement of the earth and the time it takes for the star’s light to reach it); and so on.

There is a great deal of information about eighteenth-century astronomy, metrology (the science of measurement), and politics. The diction sometimes seems a parody of eighteenth-century speech, but when you look the words up in the OED, there they are. When you read of children playing “Chuck-Farthing,” you’re likely to assume that this is Pynchon’s playful back-formation from “Pitch-Penny,” but the dictionary makes it clear that the etymology runs the other way. When Dixon, in the Dutch colony of Cape Town, becomes addicted to a Malay sauce called “ketjap” and insists on pouring it over everything he eats, you may take it as a homophonic joke. But “ketjap” is the Dutch spelling of the Malay word for what became ketchup. You would not think there could be a town in the north of England called Staindrop, but there is.

This historically meticulous account is shot through with dozens of clearly fantastical tales, some involving real personages and some involving invented ones. As is also customary with Pynchon, none of these tales ever develops into a significant subplot, and characters can come into the story, hang around for a hundred pages or longer, and then disappear, sometimes for hundreds of pages more, sometimes forever. The narrative machinery just seems to crank out one fabulous yarn after another. The book is, in short, in no great rush about getting nowhere in particular: it is novelistically “on the road.”

“What we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and ultimately meaningless,” Cherrycoke remarks of Mason and Dixon’s mission at one point, and some readers may feel this to be a fair summary of the book itself. Putting aside the possible point of the whole enterprise, though, the novel is, page by page, extremely entertaining. The tone is comic without becoming merely slapstick, and the prose never tips over into the sort of arty and impenetrable magniloquence that swamps the last section of Gravity’s Rainbow. Mason and Dixon are cleverly drawn as temperamental opposites—Mason a mopey deist who is obsessed with the ghost of his dead wife and his own professional disappointments, Dixon a cheery Quaker whose sorties in search of erotic adventure are frequently spoiled by the effects of his colleague’s damp personality. They can stand each other’s company, but just barely, and their continual bickering becomes one of the leitmotifs of the book, and forms, in the end, the basis for a rather touching friendship of a very inarticulate, very “guy” sort. This is, in Hollywood terms, a buddy story.

Almost all the characters, even the bit parts, are drawn with the same deft touch—as recognizable types in eighteenth-century dress. They come onto the page with an attitude, and Pynchon’s success in getting them to sound contemporary and colonial at the same time is quite remarkable. One of the fabulous characters, for example, is a talking dog, known professionally as the Learnèd Dog, or, as he prefers, Fang. The dog is chatting with Mason and Dixon and a sailor named Bodine (the avatar of a certain naval hipster who turns up in many of Pynchon’s books, though happily infrequently in this one) while “a small, noisy party of Fops, Macaronis, or Lunarians,—it is difficult quite to distinguish which,—has been working its way up the street and into Ear-shot.” (Macaroni was an eighteenth-century term for an effeminate young man who affected Continental manners.) Mason has been twitting the dog by pointing out that natives in the Indies enjoy a dish known as “Dog in Palm Leaf.”