Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon provides ample proof, if further proof be needed, that the most profound story in Western literature—at least so far as our cultural life is concerned—is the one about the emperor and his new clothes. It has always seemed to me that if someone writes a novel that is long, obscure, and pretentious enough, the fashionable world will rise in a body and proclaim it a masterpiece, and this is exactly what happened with Pynchon’s eight-hundred-page, all-but unreadable tome.

Henry Holt’s peppy marketing team has characterized the book with grotesque inaccuracy as being reader-friendly, a happy “buddy” story accessible not only to Pynchon-nerds but to the common reader, whoever he or she might be. Fawning reviews in the daily New York Times, the Times Book Review, and The New York Review of Books supported that specious claim, and sales boomed,...

 

A Message from the Editors

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

Popular Right Now