Pynchon and 'Mason and Dixon.'(Book Review)

Pynchon and 'Mason & Dixon'. Ed. by BROOKE HORVATH and IRVING MALIN. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 228 pp. $39.50; 32 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-87413-720-9.

Like the arc transcribed by a German V-2 rocket across the sky of wartime London that begins Thomas Pynchon's major novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the Mason-Dixon line of his latest work is asked to generate a similar half-million-word narrative. Yet half a million words are nothing compared to the scholarship that had accumulated just thirteen months after Mason & Dixon was published in 1997. The volume under review prints eleven major critical essays written to order by leading scholars, all the work submitted by June 1998. An accompanying bibliography lists over 250 additional printed items (on this new novel alone) and an editor's introduction describes an abundance of Internet sources (three dozen of them, each holding hundreds of entries) accessible by the Pynchon Server List and consisting of everything from home pages for the novel's publisher and the journal Pynchon Notes to a site called 'Gen-X Susan's Pynchon Links' (another fifty-three of them, if anyone is still counting). As far as critical response is concerned, it would seem Pynchon's Mason-Dixon line has done its job.

Generating commentary is, of course, a principal aim of an encyclopaedic novelist, and his choice of lines this time gives scholars an even greater field day for source studies. The Mason-Dixon line was surveyed in 1763-67 to establish the boundary between colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland; in the century leading up to the American Civil War, it was extended theoretically westward as the dividing line between slave states and free, and ever afterwards has indicated the cultural boundary between the North and the South as regions of the USA. To Pynchon, whose ideas were first expressed within the radical examination of American traditions during the 1960s, the Mason-Dixon line and all it has stood for are exceedingly rich materials, as the contributors to this volume establish. Co-editors Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin contribute, respectively, a summary introduction and a close reading (in the form of a nine-day journal) that put Mason & Dixon in perspective. Brian ...