Less Than Meets the Eye

(Originally in San Jose Mercury News)

MASON & DIXON by Thomas Pynchon

Henry Holt, 773 pp., $27.50

Reviewed by Daniel Akst

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, and so there is something to compare it to now: ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' an earlier work of similarly fearsome girth and difficulty that tore across the literary firmament like a missile two dozen years ago. The new work is called ''Mason & Dixon,'' and it has been launched with fussy care. Advance copies for reviewers are scarce; this is the only one you'll be getting, the publisher says, ''so please keep an eye on it.''

The writer's name would be obvious even if the words Thomas Pynchon appeared nowhere on the cover. First of all, there's the ambition of the thing: nearly 800 pages, written in a hybrid prose full of 18th-century diction and wonderful old-fashioned allegory (''the Cold Bath of Annoyance''), yet cast in the present tense, with the obsessive rhythms and comic timing one might expect of Stanley Elkin or, well, Thomas Pynchon.

All the familiar obsessions are here, too: the paranoia, the drugs, the burlesque, the reverence for things gross (delighted contemplation of stale pudding up a nose, for instance). As in earlier works, the author is forever looking skyward, taken with islands, concerned for the oppressed. There is the poet's eye for images (snowballs that have''starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings''), the genius for invention, the staggering erudition, the lists, the ditties, the puns, the dream of perpetual motion, the German, the Latin, the French, the science, the sorcery, the global scope, the cast of thousands and, yes, the pathological logorrhea. After the relatively digestible ''Vineland,'' Pynchon here firmly reestablishes himself as God's gift to underemployed graduate students. He has the right politics and appears to have read (and alluded to) everything anyone has ever written before him. His books are make-work projects for the hermeneutic set.

How unfortunate then that, for the rest of us, ''Mason & Dixon'' offers mainly bewilderment, fatigue and finally, even paradoxically, tedium. Despite the talking animals, naval bombardments, plotting clerics and so forth, the book is boring -- mainly because there is little in the way of narrative drive to propel us through this great onslaught of invention. Exhaustion sets in early: One staggers to the finish in a state nearing stupefaction, wandering half-blind in a blizzard of seeming randomness, wishing one could navigate by the stars as well as Pynchon's heroes can.

''Mason & Dixon'' is a work of hollow virtuosity, and much of what it has in common with ''Gravity's Rainbow'' turns out to be superficial. It struck me as more baffling, and even more willing to pursue garrulous Digression into the Cul-de-sac of Confusion, as Pynchon himself might have it in this work. And for all the brooding paranoia he seems to insist upon, there is little here resembling suspense. The women in this book, moreover, are mainly men's sexual fantasies come to life, forever ripping open their bodices (witness the go-go Vroom sisters -- va-va-va vroom? -- encountered in southern Africa) and otherwise diverting our boys from their sacred mission.

For the record, ''Mason & Dixon'' is the story of brooding astronomer Charles Mason and good ol' boy Jeremiah Dixon, his surveyor sidekick, told by the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke who, a la Scheherazade, has good reason to keep his hosts amused. After failing to reach Sumatra for the task of observing the passage of Venus before the sun in 1761 (they watched instead from the Cape of Good Hope), Mason and Dixon were given the difficult task of determining the latitude that serves as the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, North and South, slavery and freedom.

''Mason & Dixon'' seems to want badly to be one of those bawdy, rollicking historical novels, perhaps like John Barth's ''The Sot-Weed Factor.'' In truth, there's a lot going on here: weird woodsmen, talking dogs, an amorous mechanical duck, a golem that bears more than a passing resemblance to Popeye. The Jesuits are up to something sinister, and in addition to everything else they have to worry about, our heroes may have feng shui problems. There are Kabbalistic Trekkies (whose private salute means ''live long and prosper'') and a host of other arch anachronisms, including references to rock 'n' roll and the historical novelist Patrick O'Brian. When Ben Franklin appears, he warns against buying retail. Most of this isn't nearly as much fun as you might think.

Why Mason and Dixon? Ron Rosenbaum, a lifetime Pynchon devotee, suggested even before the book was published that it has to do with the author's ''abiding preoccupation with the power and limits of (binary) Division itself as a way of knowing, of constructing, of creating the world.'' By Rosenbaum's way of thinking, Mason and Dixon plotted the divide in the American soul. They also gave Pynchon a way to deal with most of his other abiding concerns, even if, in dealing with them, he let go of the novelist's first task, which is to persuade the reader to turn the page.

Indeed, ''Mason & Dixon'' sacrifices emotional power by lacking the kinds of characters and relationships one could care about in ''Gravity's Rainbow'' even while pawing through dictionaries, puzzling out names, or just coasting desperately until something turned up. As a pair, the famous line-finders of the North-South border just don't do it for me. They're amusing enough, with their banter and accents, but at the end of the day they seem largely vehicles for Pynchon's runaway imagination rather than flesh-and-blood creations who engage a reader's passions.

Perhaps for these reasons, the humor doesn't seem as effective either; at its least opaque, it's sort of like the Age of Reason as a lesser Mel Brooks movie. George Washington appears, but I suspect only because his manservant, Gershom, is a black Jewish stand-up comic with a knack for kosher cooking. Says Washington: ''Gersh, any them Kasha Varnishkies left?'' Pynchon loves this sophomoric stuff. Later, the future father of his country and his helper bicker like the Sunshine Boys. '''You see what I have to put up with,' groans Col. Washington. 'It's makin' me just mee-shugginah.'''

Oy. Let me state that although I've read most of Pynchon's books, I'm no Pynchon scholar. I am willing, moreover, to acknowledge my own limitations: Perhaps this behemoth book, whose contents often seem little more than New Age ravings, is actually a grand tour de force whose design exceeds the grasp of mere mortals like me. Perhaps the cultists will parse this out in the years to come.

Yet even such ''difficult'' novels as ''Ulysses'' cohere at some level that I just can't find in this one. It's hard to imagine how any lay reader can get through this thing, what he or she might get out of it, and by what measure such a novel can be considered a success. Perhaps ''Mason & Dixon'' will join ''Finnegan's Wake,'' and students will someday read snippets as an exercise. Or perhaps it will be like Stephen Hawking's ''A Brief History of Time,'' and become the book that everybody owns but nobody can finish.

Pynchon himself, in speaking of Dixon, offers an apt description of the dogged reader of this novel who flogs himself through to the bitter end: ''He has certainly, and more than once, too, dreamt himself upon a dark Mission whose details he can never quite remember, feeling in the grip of Forces no one will tell him of, serving Interests invisible. He wakes more indignant than afraid.''

Daniel Akst is the author of ''St. Burl's Obituary,'' a novel.