![]() ![]() ![]() For Pynchon’s book fans out from this event, using it as the basis of an enquiry into the reason (and madness) of the Enlightenment, the brutalities of slavery, the nature of time, the origins and futures (I use the plural deliberately) of America, and much more besides. To describe it thus, however, is to limit the breadth of the novel and diminish the author’s astonishing ambitions. It is more concretely historical than his other novels because at its core is the re-presentation of a singular significant act in the American past: the drawing of the Mason–Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. To a greater or lesser degree each partakes in the discourse of history, but it is the 1997 novel Mason Dixon, with its eighteenth-century setting, language and typography (use of the em dash capitalisation of real nouns William Caslon’s ampersand, etc.) which is most deeply embedded in the past.1 As such it is, as most reviewers and critics have noted, the author’s clearest attempt at writing a full-fledged historical fiction. All of Thomas Pynchon’s novels have a deep vein of history running through them. ![]()
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