Local book review: 'Mason & Dixon: A Novel'

Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke spins quite a tale in Thomas Pynchon's book.

Mason & Dixon: A Novel
Thomas Pynchon
(Picador, 1997, 784 pp.)

Mason & Dixon: A Novel opens in the cozy rear parlor of a Philadelphia home on “Christmastide of 1786,” where the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, like an American Scheherazade, sets out to keep nieces, nephews and cousins entertained, and what a tale he has to spin.

The adventures of Charles Mason — the awkward, depressive astronomer — and his partnership with Jeremiah Dixon — a Falstaffian, impulsive surveyor — take them from England to Cape Town to St. Helena and America; first to mark the transit of Venus, and then to demarcate the line that would bear their name. 

Those adventures play out in Thomas Pynchon’s great spiritual drama as various ideas of order vie against chaos, and become it. The age of reason carries within it the madness of slavery and the dispossession of indigenous populations; science is entangled with ancient mysticisms; we meet an erratic and sagacious Ben Franklin turning his electric discoveries into a nightclub act he performs. 

And the Mason-Dixon line itself is a grand metaphor, “changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.”

Pynchon’s prose, then, has never been more remarkable. And in the anachronisms of the language, his doggerel has never known a truer home:  “A young man seeking to advance himself/ Will get him to the nearest Source of Pelf/ And few of these are more distinctly Pelfier/ Than — Long Life, Queen of Schuylkill! — Philadelphia.”