Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon

First edition cover
Author	Thomas Pynchon
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Postmodern novel, historical novel Biography
Published	1997 (Henry Holt and Company)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	773 pp
ISBN
OCLC	36430653
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3566.Y55 M37 1997

Postmodern novel, historical novel

Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by U.S. author Thomas Pynchon published in 1997. It concentrates on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.

The novel is a frame narrative told from the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke – a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy – who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house). Claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys, Cherrycoke tells a tale intermingling Mason and Dixon's biographies with history, fantasy, legend, speculation, and outright fabrication.

The novel's scope takes in aspects of established Colonial American history including the call of the West, the often ignored histories of women, North Americans, and slaves, plus excursions into geomancy, Deism, a hollow Earth, and — perhaps — alien abduction. The novel also contains philosophical discussions and parables of automata/robots, the after-life, the eleven days lost to the Gregorian calendar, slavery, feng shui and others. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Nevil Maskelyne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, and John Harrison's marine chronometer all make appearances. Pynchon provides an intricate conspiracy theory involving Jesuits and their Chinese converts, which may or may not be occurring within the nested and ultimately inexact narrative structure.