This story is related to an unruly bunch of kids on a series of winter’s nights in 1786 (“the War settl'd and the Nation bickering itself into Fragments”) by one Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base.” But Pynchon, as ever, is never only writing biography or history indeed, he writes that “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. Mason and Dixon survive, of course, into the present as the name of the line that separates North from South (the southern boudary of Pennsylvania). The story involves the lives, travels and adventures of two globe-trotting Brits, an astronomer and a surveyor, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, as they travel south to the Cape of Good Hope and then west, into North America. It’s a huge book, not just in number of pages, but in ideas, both comic and profound, and in erudition. Trying to calculate the arc of the narrative of Mason & Dixon is as difficult as the calculus involved in calculating the arc of a thrown snowball. “Snow-Balls have… their Arcs,” Thomas Pynchon’s fifth novel begins.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |