DRAWING THE LINE

By Paul Gray

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; $27.50).

Pynchon, the one-time enfant terrible of American literature, turns 60 this May. He still refuses to give interviews or pose for photographers, but his whereabouts are now known. New York magazine reported last fall that Pynchon has been living quietly in Manhattan--an odd choice for a presumptive recluse--with his wife and young son for the past six or so years. In 1996 he attracted gossipy notice by writing the liner notes for an album by the alternative-rock band Lotion and appearing as an enthusiastic booster at some of the group's concerts. If this behavior suggests someone in no mood to act his age, then so does Pynchon's new novel, which shows that he is still the smartest and, occasionally, the most exasperating kid around.

And no one 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.

But Pynchon's new novel is in some ways even more 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 he must by his faith seek, as the American Ranger, however indeterminate or unposted his Wilderness, may enjoy, ever at his Back, the Impulse of Duty he must, by his Honor, attend."

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 of 18th century notables, including Benjamin Franklin, George and Martha Washington (who sing a duet) and Dr. Samuel Johnson, accompanied by his biographer-to-be James Boswell.

But for all its 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.

Pynchon vividly recounts the dangers and struggles Mason and Dixon endure in carrying out their assignment. And it slowly becomes clear that this story is not about a triumph of 18th century scientific methods, which Pynchon explains in elaborate detail, but rather about a tragic desecration, a deadly abstraction imposed upon land once natural and truly free. Mason and Dixon cannot foresee the bloodshed that will rage across their line a century later, during the U.S. Civil War, but both men, in Pynchon's telling, come to believe that they did something wrong to the wilderness. Years later Mason tells Dixon that their work in America amounted to "Campaigning, geometrick as a Prussian Cavalry advance,--tho' in the service of a Flag whose Colors we never saw."

Pynchon's distinctive genius, as revealed again in this novel, is his ability to keep diametrically opposing opinions in a fascinating, jittery suspension. He loves the intellectual purities of science and understands them better than any American novelist ever. He also loathes the power that science bestows, since it always ends up in the wrong hands, i.e., those with a hunger for such power. At its most eloquent, Mason & Dixon becomes an epic of loss. The conquering of the wilderness means "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."

Are contemporary readers, beguiled by everything electronic, willing to do the hard, head-scratching work that Pynchon's uncompromising prose demands? Perhaps not; tough books are unfashionable at the moment. But those who beg off the long journey through Mason & Dixon will deprive themselves of a unique and miraculous experience.