meh
this would be my first fiction review, and i'm generally not going to write out plot summaries. that's not what i'm aiming for with this site.
mason & dixon is a story, and it's a fairly focused one, at that. it's almost entirely void of the sort of tangential narratives that i find are the most interesting part of pynchon's writing. i'm talking about the little short story allegories, the disconnected characters, the secondary plotlines in paranoia. when these devices do appear, they almost seem like they're just tossed in haphazardly to appeal to a market. pynchon was clearly aiming for something a little more in line with traditional story-telling. while the book has been well received on that level, i don't have much interest in the concept. so, i wasn't really able to get into it.
nor are the historical aspects drawn out as well as they are in some of his other texts. a number of historical characters (george washington, benjamin franklin, thomas jefferson and others) make appearances but the silliness is very heavy-handed, to the point that they're presented as cartoon characters. intentional? well, perhaps, but it's not all that satisfying. i was sort of hoping for a deeper exploration into the idea of the american revolution being a sort of a conspiracy by the landholding classes. rather than get into that, he talks about jesuits and a conspiracy in the royal society that almost seems borrowed from gulliver's travels. the discussions of fate that follow are sort of marginalized by the silliness of his chosen conspiracy. further, he kind of falls into the romanticism of the era more than he challenges it, and that's definitely a disappointment.
the general silliness is another thing to point out. pynchon is known for his sense of humour, it's one of the primary draws, but i feel this text is sort of dumbed-down on that point. the humour is less academic and more slapstick; i'm not presenting a dichotomy here, he usually delves into both, but the slapstick is really disproportionately high and that deprives the text of a certain difficulty that one expects from the author. the few things that he does get into at a higher level, like the allegory with the clocks, don't justify the length of the text that holds them.
slavery is a theme, and while he does portray it in a bit of an interesting light, he's also a little timid in condemning it. likewise, i'm not entirely sure why he went out of his way to hide the homo-erotic nature of the relationship between the two main characters. pynchon certainly usually isn't shy about sexuality. why be so veiled about it in 1997, when the taboo is finally on the cusp of being shattered? i can't help but feel that he let his gay audience down a little in obscuring things rather than discussing it openly.
the prose is long and thick, and if that's all you want then you won't be disappointed. however, when you put it all together, there seems to have been a push from somewhere - perhaps his publisher, or perhaps people well connected within the corridors of power - to present something more palatable, perhaps for academic use at the high school or lower undergraduate level. it's his least difficult novel and his least controversial. it doesn't challenge the prevailing understanding of events, perhaps because somebody instructed it be written that way. if that was the intent, he may have succeeded. however, the result is likely to come off as a little dry for all of the same reasons that all the other books that profs pick out are dry. if you want to get into pynchon seriously then you have to read everything because they're interconnected, but i wouldn't recommend this as a starting point.
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/PS/3566.Y53M37/index.html