MASON & DIXON by Thomas Pynchon 

One of only a very few novels that have left me in tears at the end.

Great review: glad to see Pynchon's M&D get some love. I think it's his best work, and if I recall correctly, even Harold Bloom agreed. Good stuff!

Finding your channel has definitely been the greatest thing that has happened for me in this tough time. Thank you for your videos! And the passion you share and inspire for literature

Through the labyrinth of 18th century American history, I believe this book is actually a love story between the the two main characters.

The density and flamboyance of the language bring Gerard Manley Hopkins to mind, particularly Pie'd beauty. Great review

How cool that I stumbled across this generous sharing of insights. M&D has been gathering dust on my nightstand. Back to it!

This is an amazing breakdown and exploration of Mason and Dixon! Wow. I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day, Bleeding Edge, and Inherent Vice and Iove him as a writer, I did take a crack at M&D but I ended up putting it down. Mostly due to its sometimes hard to follow prose I guess. But man, your intelligent and beautiful dive into its contents here has totally inspired me to give it another go! Thanks so much for all your extensive and hard work with this channel, it's an extremely high quality resource for talking about and finding new literature for me to read!! Thank you!

Excellent review. Mason & Dixon may be my favorite Pynchon along with The Crying of Lot 49. When M&D was scandalously remaindered soon after its release, I felt it was just too great and the public had behaved as if didn’t deserve it. LOL. I wound up buying ~10 hardback 1sts for $5/ea at the time. I think you successfully conveyed so much of its richness and the pleasure of reading it. Thank you.

Pynchon infuses paranoia into the story. The Jesuit flying duck is essentially a drone. Great Channel.

So glad you enjoyed it. I had misgivings about M&D when I started it -- it seemed so unlike any of the Pynchon that came before it, I thought I'd be disappointed. Was I wrong. It's unlike, and so like, Pynchon. It's one of his best, IMHO, and for me right up there with my favs Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day. Great review, as always.

Just got the book a few months ago before this whole chaos, and started reading it yesterday. Already cried twice, DUDE, it's so beautifuuuul, geez. Will comment again after watching your video but 🥰🥰 also, freaking bonus that Mark Knopfler led me to this book, dat man ❤

Speaking of Pynchon introducing historical people, when I was reading Against the Day I was also reading Nikola Tesla's collection "My inventions and other writings" (*highly* recommended btw), and it made for a really delightful pairing. I love Pynchon's usage of historical figures, it's always interesting.

i must say that your grasp and understanding towards this work is spotless, tbh most people give out limerick kind of description which are more likely dull and shorter than wikipedia's digest. the reference to klein bottle and mathematical topology incorporates perfectly with this obscure script. no wonder pynchon's reclusive tendency fueled some of the best piece of work of art! also if u ever get the chance to review marcel schwob ( this guy influenced some bad boys like georges bataille, roberto bolano and borges), pls do! he incorporated surrealism and phenomenology with literature.

Wonderful review and really made me want to read this. I promised myself this would be the year I focused on longer books -- given the bounty it may be my lifetime reading plan.

Excellent presentation. Happy to subscribe. I think this is one of the greatest books ever written.

I've only just gotten through the episode where they meet George Washington but as I was watching I was hoping you would bring up the Lost 11 Days thing. My own take was that Pynchon was poking fun at the way even trivial questions about big subjects that can never have a material impact on us still capture people's minds in an almost obsessive way. And how such an immaterial controversy still became a point of contention that caused people to take sides against the opposing schools of thought on the matter, despite knowing (they must know?) that the answer doesn't really matter. I think it fits into Pynchon's larger theme in MD but also GR that the so-called Age of Reason may have replaced religious narratives with scientific ones, but it hasn't delivered us from our human-ness and all the un-reason that this entails. Great content and I'm glad to have found you so early in your RU-vid career!

My favorite book. Just discovered this channel. Thanks for the wonderful content

Saving this for when I start m&d. I like the way the vid is shot to show the movement of the sun and its attendant shadows. 😊

One of my favorite books. And plug for the Pynchon in Public podcast. Can't wait until we get to this one

Convinced me to reread it! Great video.

The duck is excellent! Great review

Great breakdown of my favourite Pynchon!

How did this GREAT NOVEL not win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? Yes, awards for art are sort of ridiculous, but sometimes the choice is obvious.

Thank you. A very good book review. You have certainly given me a greater appreciation of what this book is about. (I recently completed ‘Against The Day’, so I expect it will be a month or two before I begin reading Mason & Dixon.)

I've only read The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, which I thought was excellent, but, as a non-native English speaker, I've always been intimidated by Mason & Dixon because of the language. I already own Gravity's Rainbow and V., so I'll explore those first, before attempting to read this one.

Excellent review! I, too, have been picking that book up for years just to marvel at the first sentence. I'm sure that's pretty common. I have a short list of long books that I'll be attempting to read during this quarantine. I'm starting Ulysses today, and next up will be W&M. Hopefully this thing doesn't last long enough for me to finish both, but if it does I'll be moving on to M&D after that.

never clicked on a video so fast.

Love your bookshelves. Nice review. Great author.

Great review Chris, another masterpiece by Pynchon. How many great novels does he need to have to win the Nobel?

Thank you, that is very useful

Such a great book, thank you for this video!

This needs a few remarks. First, there is a good reason for the South Africa part being so large. It gives the technological tools for what they do then in America. The, I would mention the leylines as complementary to the lines of the surveyor. And finally, the coffee houses were suspect for being revolutionary hothouses and not a point at consumerism.

Great review! I will be picking it up soon. I actually first heard of this book as the inspiration for Mark Knopfler's song Sailing to Philadelphia.

Brilliant doing it with the fiery orb casting creeping glare to and near past your hair! (Imagine my luck as this comes while I am finally swimming about mothly the Gravity's Rainbow.)

To tell the truth, you aroused my curiosity so much that I think I'll give m&d a try. Today I've watched all youtube videos about m&d and I have to say that yours, dear friend, is the awesomest. Honestly by miles. I've seen this video 2 times. And maybe more if I'll start reading m&d. You are born to be a literary critic/ writer. I'm looking forward to your next "scientific" book tour!

Dang, you’re on fire, great video. I’d love to know more about the meta fictional and recursive aspects of Pynchon’s work, do you know about some good paper or article about it? I don’t hear people going into narrative recursion in detail, and As I recall you work in a computer sciences related field(maybe I’m mistaken) so, you probably know from first hand what recursion is.

Just so enjoyable. Love the insight and nuances you bring to the table . Watched Gravity's Rainbow it seems above me you made it relatable .Off Topic Any:Thoughts on Haruki Murakami ?

I trust you have a long list of potential videos in the works, but I just started Against The Day this week and can already tell I'm going to love it. We all know your love for behemoth books, so I thought this might be the space to ask if you've read it and if so, if there's any chance at a video at some point?

Great review Chris. Of the unread books on my shelf, this one is toward the top of my list of ones I want to read. Unfortunately I haven’t read any Pynchon before and I’ve heard this isn’t the best place to start. Would you recommend reading something shorter like The Crying of Lot 49 or something easier like Inherent Vice first, or is it fine to just jump into Mason & Dixon?

While the novel's play with archaic language is fun and explosive and ingenious, I don't think the xviii century lingo calque, aside from some of the dialogue, actually makes it feel like an xviii century novel or text of any sort. While prolixity and long periods were ever present in the literature and essays of the time, the syntax, and by extension the prose in M&D is nothing like the style of writing one would find in texts by Richardson, Fielding, Defoe, Johnson, Pope ecc. Pynchon always writes like Pynchon, he can't help it, and his (very modern) prose is recognizable a mile away even when dressed up in whigs and petticoats. Also, if I had to take a guess, I'd say this 'fake mimesis' is done on purpose, just as all of his characters never stray too much away form being very clear, and purposeful, caricatures. This is what he's always done, treating reality as pure artifice. It's why sentient lightbulbs and pendulum clocks and 'Learn' d' dogs which lead one to palm readings can be treated as mere fact within his novels' crazy, artificial worlds.

Very well done man!,,,,!!!

This was a Harold Bloom recommendation also.

I began reading this one last week after giving up on Gravity's Rainbow in spite of your great and interesting 3 hour pitch. I tried Mason and Dixon a few years ago, but gave up after a while, but this time through, i'm finding it surprisingly 'easy' to read, in the sense that once you get acquainted with the 18th century style language, the main story not difficult to follow (I'm sure that I've missed a million references by now) and the chapters are very digestible.

great work. you should review Vineland

I love this book! That is all.

My favorite things are the Warebeaver and the duck.

Maybe just my resding of it, but I don't think I've ever read a book that was so, on the surface, lighthearted and funny, hopeful even, only by the end realizing how brutally cynical and sad it was. Mason and Dixon, as figures, represent this sort of hopeful idea Pynchon has for the average American, that through wordliness, experience, camaraderie, joy and wit we can overcome prejudices, violence and morosity to love one another and cast away the genocidal, slave-driving project at the heart of whatever is called "the West." But he realizes even such hopes are just purposeful historiography, Euro-American propaganda, sensationalism and pure fiction--metafiction, even. It is, in the end, just as brutal of a story as V. and Gravity's Rainbow, containing, like those two, messages to those hepcats faithful enough to see them to hang on and to not give up just yet. An incredible, melancholic and sobering read. Also just now stupidly realized that the repeated imagery of stars and lines was meant to evoke the image of the American flag lol

Would you recommend reading some 18th century novels before Mason and Dixon? If so which ones?

Hur går det med svenskan? As a Swedish speaker I was not able to read this in the original 18th century English. Took my so long to understand the first few pages so I went with the Swedish version instead. I feel like the nuances and flow in a translation of this book could differ a lot from the original.

Can you post a link to the other book you talked about (by Stephen Moore?)

Your review is awesome as usual. But after having read the crying of lot 49 and gravity's rainbow, I've understood that pynchon is not among my favourite authors. Maybe in the future I'll give him another try by starting from "mason & dixon". In these days I'm reading an astonishing novel "the discovery of heaven" by harry mulisch. One of the best novel I've ever read since the beginning of the year. If you have not read it yet, I heavily recommend you.

I Barley Started Reading This Book. The Reference Of Bill Clinton Made Me Laugh

meh, he’s no cormac mccarthy

Advanced crossword puzzles? Lmao, I don't even know English then.

Enjoyed it, except for the silly stuff. It was distracting.

PhD in English here and my god, for me, Pynchon's such a bore and a chore; I don't see why one wouldn't just read a READ 18th cent. novel like Clarissa, Humphrey Clinker (hilarious and light on its feet, as it were), or Tom Jones. notwithstanding the--yes, admittedly--poetic bursts of his prose, it's just so bloody silly. punt.