Just out of curiosity, Tartarin...why did you aim your Pynchon bibliographjy at me personally instead of the five other people on this thread who have also stated that they dislike Pynchon? It certainly seems as though you are exhibiting personal hostility towards me.
And Louis Menand is a horse's ass. His recent essay on Orwell in THE NEW YORKER was an appallingly dishonest, inaccurate, fraudulent piece of work. The letters the magazine printed the following week reflected how far Menand strayed from the facts.
Just out of curiosity, Tartarin...why did you aim your Pynchon bibliography at me personally instead of the five other people on this thread who have also stated that they dislike Pynchon? It certainly seems as though you are exhibiting personal hostility towards me.
And Louis Menand is a horse's ass. His recent essay on Orwell in THE NEW YORKER was an appallingly dishonest, inaccurate, fraudulent piece of work. The letters the magazine printed the following week reflected how far Menand strayed from the facts.
And Tartarin, why did you aim your Pynchon biblliography at ME personally instead of the five OTHER people who have posted on this thread that they can't stand Pynchon? Seems like an act of personal hostility and aggression against me.
Also, Louis Menand is a horse's ass. His recent Orwell essay in the NEW YORKER was loaded with misquotations and inaccuracies, as the letters to the
magazine the week after it appeared made clear. Menand is a third-rate mind, which no doubt explains his appeal for you...
I apologize for the multiple posting. My puter fouled up on me.
I apologize for the multiple posting. My puter fouled up on me.
[size-11]Quotes for MASON & DIXON:
"Awash with light and charm, rich with suggestion and idea, stuffed with the minutiae of another time and world. Mason & Dixon is less a book to read through than to read in, to savor paragraph by paragraph."
--Paul Skenazy, San Francisco Chronicle
"A masterpiece."
--Ted Mooney, The Los Angeles Times
"As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces. This almost feels like the last great fiction of our dying era. Though I'm sure it won't be, I must admire its sense of the bright farewell, the clear passing overseas of the torch that Peacock, Dickens, Lawrence, and Conrad bore. You'll not find a better, this next time round."
--John Fowles, The Spectator
"A dazzling work of imaginative re-creation, a marvel-filled historical novel...Exceptionally funny."
--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
"Mason & Dixon will make you want to curse American history, then turn around and bless it, because nowhere else but America could find a zany literary genius like Thomas Pynchon."
--Malcolm Jones Jr., Newsweek
"Splendid...Mason & Dixon--like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses--is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature."
--John Leonard, The Nation
"Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected."
--Harold Bloom, Bostonia
"This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except maybe V, and Gravity's Rainbow."
--T. Coraghessan Boyle, The New York Times Book Review
"A unique and miraculous experience...A tale of scientific triumph and an epic of loss."
--Paul Gray, Time
"This is the book of a lifetime."
--Frank MacConnell, Commonweal
"It is a sad and beautiful and nutty and profound book...All I can do is doff my cap."
--Luc Sante, New York Magazine
"An astonishing and wonderful book."
--Louis Menand, The New York Review of Books
"Very grand and mad and beautiful...I can't remember ever having reviewed a more original novel...and if America produces a novel to come near this marvelous, proliferating thing this decade, I promise to eat it."
--Philip Hensher, Spectator
"A contemporary Don Quixote or Canterbury Tales--or more accurately the Iliad and Odyssey, with heavy splashes of Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers. Pynchon's not only back, but he's left us all in the dust again, with only the sound of his laughter echoing far in front of us."
--Jim Knipfel, New York Press
"With Mason & Dixon we're again in the generous hands of one of American literature's true masters."
--Rick Moody, The Atlantic Monthly[/size]
Time Out New York
April 24-May 1, 1997
Reviewed by Joel Stein
Mason & Dixon is the best 18th-century novel anyone has written in a long time. Amidst all the random Capitalization, irregular spellings and forc'd contractions lie some of the most thoughtful, funny and lyrical passages in English literature. Pamela, shamela. . .
. . .It's still got all the Pynchon staples -- slapstick, songs, paranoia, obtuseness, political conspiracy, sex, new characters popping out of nowhere, fantastical elements (a talking dog, a giant cheese, Jenkins's severed ear transformed into a Delphic oracle), that odd obsession with erections -- they're just embedded in a more linear, cautious plotline. Pynchon is king enough to warn you of this while you're still in line at the bookstore, worming your way through that first, intricate, half-page sentence that simply tells you that some kids go to their room. . .
. . .With his sly echoes of Moby Dick and Huck Finn, and his eminently American choice of topic, Pynchon is asking the reader to define the Great American Novel. Mason & Dixon itself is neither epic enough, nor passionate enough, to embody that myth. But it's so bold, so ingenious, so downright Freacky -- a swirling, irreverent recasting of history, a stateside Tristram Shandy -- that it is the Most American Novel we could ask for.
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New York Daily News
April 27, 1997
Reviewed by Vince Passaro
. . .With Mason & Dixon, some might say, Pynchon has mellowed. A rollicking, bawdy and impossible re-imagining of the lives of the two English surveyors who in the 1760s plotted the border between colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland (the famed Mason-Dixon line that caused so much trouble later on, symbolically dividing North from South), Pynchon's newest is as hallucinatory as ever but somehow more genial, even in its darker corners. . .
. . .And so with Pynchon's marvelous circles of comical adventure a sadder and more lasting story is being told -- about the mad passions and incurable irrationality behind a lifetime of work, behind grumbling friendship, science, truth and survival.
This long book winds down with a kind of majestic grace, having mimicked the stages of a life, from play to ideas, from adventure to struggle to work, and finally from middle age to illness and death. Near the end, just after America's Revolution, comes this description of Mason: "Increasingly ill at ease with change of any kind, be it growing a year older or watching America -- once home to him as the Desert to Nomad upon it -- in its great Convulsion, Mason has begun to dream of a night-time City -- of creeping monuments of stone perhaps twice his height, of seeking refuge from some absolute pitiless Upheaval in relations among Men."
The same might be said of Pynchon himself, seeking a refuge among his own strange, dreamed monuments, from the pitiless upheavals assailing the honest eye and the active imagination.
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U.S. News and World Report
"NEW & NOTABLE", May 5, 1997
LONE WRITERS
Do not disturb: recluse at work
Article by Thom Geier
Seeking a quiet place to write, Henry David Thoreau retreated to a cabin by Walden Pond. Though he lived there just over two years, he was deemed a hermit. "The mere idea of reclusiveness," says Thoreau biographer Robert Richardson Jr., "caught the American imagination in an astonishing way."
The literary recluse still holds appeal. Take J. D. Salinger, whose last interview was to a high school reporter in 1953. Several months ago, Orchises Press announced the publication of his first new book in 34 years, a novella that ran in the New Yorker in 1965. After the media frenzy began, the book was delayed indefinitely.
Another publicity-shy author, Thomas Pynchon, continues producing new work. This week, the literary giant delivers his first novel in seven years, the 773-page historical saga Mason & Dixon (Henry Holt, $27.50). The jokey tale of the 18th-century surveyors who divided America has won rave reviews and boffo buzz on the Internet, where conspiracy-minded Pynchon has many fans.
An author tour is out. (This is a guy who refused to send his photo to Cornell's freshman register in 1953.) But bookstores will stage readings, Pynchon imitator contests, and even adult puppet shows acting out works like V. and Gravity's Rainbow. "Everyone focuses on having a talking head on Oprah," says Holt publicist Cathy Melnicki. "But Pynchon is just about the literature." That's a welcome change in an age when hype springs eternal.
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New York Times Magazine
April 27, 1997
Big Tom
By John Glassie
Wednesday is the release date for "Mason & Dixon," the closely guarded new novel by Thomas Pynchon. 2. Bookstores are forbidden to display it until then, but the novel's 119-word opening sentence has been on the Internet for weeks. 3. It begins: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings. . . ." 4. The publisher, Henry Holt, says this story of Mason and Dixon, the 18th-century British surveyors, features "ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse." 5. Pynchon-ophiles are celebrating their recluse's bewitching prose at events like the "Open Mike Thomas Pynchon Imitator Contest," tonight at KGB in New York. "We're hoping he'll show," says Denis Woychuk, KGB's principal owner. "Maybe with a few drinks in him, he'd tip his hand."
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Cleveland Plain-Dealer
April 27, 1997
Reviewed by Brooke Horvath
Who or what makes history, how and toward what ends? How are history's portents to be read, and where does it touch, in the words of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, the hem of "an ever-departing Deity"?
. . . For Pynchon, history has been a conspiracy of warring factions whose business is trade and death. Science and technology are tow of the reasonable world's most ominously magic-haunted weapons, conjuring nightmares while denying what everywhere percolates behind and beyond them: ghostly signs and wonders, mystery and madness, sinister machinations...
. . . For the reclusive Pynchon, whose personal life is wrapped in enigma and riddled by rumor, what better subject than these two shadowy figures through whom to explore that intersection of history and imagination where fact bleeds into fiction? As one of the novel's characters puts it, history "is not Chronology. . .nor is it Remembrance." Rather, to keep it safe from those with power who would put it to their own bloody ends, history must "be tended lovingly and honorable by fabulists and conterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius."
Mason & Dixon is more decorous that Pynchon's previous work. Its prose mimics an 18th-century style (including the capitalized nouns and archaic spellings), and its narrative line is straight as a plum bob swaying in an ill wind. The portentous concerns at the heart of the novel emerge as gradually as the stars at nightfall. . . .
. . . More accessible but no less ravishing than Gravity's Rainbow," Mason & Dixon is what it posits America to be, a "Continent of Hazard." Or say that this massive, and massively ambitious, book surveys what Mason understands an episode in his life to have been: a "torn Remnant of a Sub-History unwitness'd." Mason & Dixon is a major novel and well worth the wait. If the stars are, as Mason imagines them, "the light-handed trickery of God," this novel merits five stars.
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Baltimore Sun
April 27, 1997
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Pynchon's glamorous low profile forces his books to speak for themselves, and speak they do, at great length, often brilliantly, not always comprehensibly, setting generations of literature majors aflame with their labyrinthine plots and inspired language.
Which brings us to Mason & Dixon, Pynchon's fifth novel. If you cringe at the prospect of reading nearly 800 pages about the two surveyors commissioned in 1768 by the Royal Society in London to settle a boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland, take heart: There is magic here. . . .
. . . How else to evoke the epic excitement of our country's beginnings, which is Pynchon's goal here, than with a book stuffed with grand complications, long views and big pictures, and no small does of bewilderment?
What Pynchon gives us . . . is a novel as fit to burst with energy and promise as early America itself. . . .
. . . With passages of breathtaking virtuosity. There isn't another writer alive who could imagine anything along the lines of this thrilling, sloppy monster of a novel.
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Newsweek Magazine
April 27, 1997
The Master Surveyor
by Malcolm Jones Jr.
Sometimes things are what they seem. For years it was rumored (beginning, if you want to get picky, in this magazine) that Thomas Pynchon was writing a novel about the Mason-Dixon line. But anyone who knows anything about Pynchon knew that it couldn't be that simple. What was this reclusive mystery man really up to, under this preposterous Mason-Dixon cover? And where was he up to it? Tucked away in Timbuktu? No, as it prosaically turns out, he's been hiding in plain sight in Manhattan, with a wife and a kid and a more or less normal existence, if you can call anyone normal who won't talk to the media or have his picture taken. And the long-awaited Pynchon novel, in stores this week, turns out really to be about the Mason-Dixon line. But here's the mysterious part: at a time when just about everyone is saying that the glory days of American fiction are either behind us or in front of us, here's Pynchon with a hugh, ambitious book that may not be the Great American Novel but, hey, it walks like a great novel, it talks like a great novel, so
Mason & Dixon (Henry Holt, $27.50) sprawls over three continents and half the 18th century. Its central narrative is factual. In 1764 two Englishman, the astronomer Charles Mason and the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, were hired by the Royal Society to settle the boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The job took five years, but we still feel its effects. Ten years before the Revolution, Mason and Dixon sawed the country in two.
North and South, slave states and free states: the import of what the two men formalized was recognized instantly. Pynchon's genius is to use the line as a starting point, the place where America's deepest characteristics - violence, restlessness - and contradictions - slaveholding vs. freedom-loving - came into sharp focus. And while he decorates his main plot with high-spirited yarns about everything form a talking dog to a feng shui master, the levity never quite hides this novel's tragic heart. Near the end, Dixon bemoans the fact that slaves suffer worldwide, then cries, "America was the one place we should not have found them." That sentence stops you cold and leaves you shivering.
Pynchon fans will find the familiar delights. There are oddball names (Wicks Cherrycoke, Vrou Vroom). Paranoia abounds (who wants this line, the East India Company? the Jesuits?). There are inside jokes (the first line, "Snow-Balls have flown their arcs
" echoes the first line of "Gravity's Rainbow," "A screaming comes across the sky
") and shamelessly dumb jokes (Mason and Dixon smoking dope with George Washington).
But despite the usual load of literary sass, this is a very different Pynchon. "Mason & Dixon" has far more heart than his other novels. The scene in which the melancholic Mason is visited by the ghost of his late wife is both hair-raising and heartbreaking, and there is no better modern portrait of heroism than the moment when Dixon tears a bloody whip from a slave auctioneer's hand. "Mason & Dixon" will make you want to curse American history, then turn around and bless it, because no where else but America could you find a zany literary genius like Thomas Pynchon.
Thanks for posting those reviews, Tartarin. They reminded me why I so enjoyed Mason & Dixon. And it is warm-hearted at times, not always what one expects from Pynchon...And, of course, quite funny at many moments!
Thanks, D'art! They may all be written by horse's asses, for all I know!
Too true, Tartarin, after all, they praise Pynchon. What could they know? I, for example, had been an admirer of Louis Menand. Now I know better!
Well, we are here only to learn from this great fellow-reader. I hate to think of all the mistakes I've made. Agreeing with the likes of Menand and Fowles and Skenazy.... Now I ask you, how could I have been so stupid!
I know the feeling, Tartarin. Now, before I read anything in the NY Review of Books, NY Times or New Yorker, I'd better have the critic vetted by our fellow reader. I wouldn't want to be swayed by a horse's ass...
You guys must be having an off day. Where is your trademark slashing sarcasm? I expected better from you. This is what happens when you read Louis Menand...you become as blah and bland as he is.
I know what you mean, D'artagnan. Do you have a list of permitted writers? My latest copy of LRB came in today. Who knows what I may be tainted by next!
I await further word in this regard, Tartarin. Thus far there's Menand, Fowles and Skenazy. We must be enlightened by a new message. I'm especially unhappy about having to strike Menand from my reading list; I thought his recent New Yorker essay on "The Cat in the Hat" was rather cogent...
Frightfully cogent, D'art. But obviously infra dig. I may have to go looking for reviews of Menand just to make me feel better...
You know, plenty of bad books have gotten better reviews than THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB did. Examples: THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen, AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth, the Rabbit novels by Updike. Am I supposed to be shamed into submission by the fact that Menand got a few good reviews?
The fact remains that Menand's piece on Orwell was glaringly off base, full of distortions and misquotations. Maybe he should stick to children's literature and leave criticism of grown-up writers to the grown-ups.
