rodent roundup - april 2026

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about fandom in relation to The Pitt, and in that article I obliquely referenced my history as a member of fandoms and how I fell away from engaging with things in that mode. I was lying a little bit when I wrote that. I felt the old Fan in me emerge when I finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which took me the entire calendar year thus far to get through.

At first, I found it almost impenetrably dense. Pynchon’s prose is typically loopy and hard to follow—his favorite trick is transitioning to entirely new places and times and characters in the middle of paragraphs, instigating a lot of “Wait, what’s going on?” reverse-flipping for a less than perfectly attentive reader such as myself. Learning to accept this befuddlement as a part of the experience helped Gravity’s Rainbow click for me. Reading it is like taking a cross-country train journey: It’s okay to turn your head and let the view out the window change behind you.

Mason & Dixon is a little less freewheeling. Its heroes are the surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, whose eponymous Line cementing the borders between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland would later come to represent the colloquial border between slavery and freedom in Civil War America. The story is told by their erstwhile traveling companion, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, years after the fact to his extended family one snowy winter evening in 1786. We get the narrative in discrete episodes, each chronicling another of Mason and Dixon’s strange adventures across the British colonies. Being largely linear and focused on one group of characters, they tend to go down more easily than the episodes in Gravity’s Rainbow.

The language was more of a stumbling block for me. Pynchon writes in a heavily affected style here, one I would best describe as “Conversational 18th Century.” I say “conversational” because it doesn’t actually read that much like the novels of the period. Here’s an excerpt from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones:

Mrs Honour had no sooner left the kitchen in the manner we have before seen than the landlady fell severely upon her. The poor woman had indeed been loading her heart with foul language for some time, and now it scoured out of her mouth, as filth doth from a mud-cart, when the board which confines it is removed. Partridge likewise shovelled in his share of calumny, and (what may surprize the reader) not only bespattered the maid, but attempted to sully the lily-white character of Sophia herself.

The prose here is so pleasant, the metaphor universally understandable, the imagery potent. The lengthy sentence is characteristic of the time, but it reads with buttery smoothness. By contrast, here’s an excerpt from Mason & Dixon:

Dixon takes to wearing a coonskin cap. Mason is alarm’d,— “That something has happen’d to your hair,” is what he says aloud, whilst thinking, that Dixon has become a Werewolf, or even worse,— some New World Creature without a name, at home among the illimitable possibilities of Evil in this Forest, . . . some Manifestation to daylight denied. . . . Meanwhile Dixon, sensing in his partner but a lower order of Snakes-and-Bears Jumpiness, in Fun begins appearing at the Tent-opening with the tail of the Hat pull’d round in front of his face, screaming in a Pitman’s Cant intelligible but to himself. Mason’s reactions are all he is hoping for, and more. The Quill goes into a panicky skate off the page,— Mason looks frantically about for a weapon. Dixon quickly reverses the bushy Tail.

“Surprize!”

“Not funny.”

Pynchon loads every page with “eye-stoppers”: Capitalized nouns, em-dashes, ellipses. He’s pulling your attention in a million different directions before you even try to process the words themselves. His sentences have a verbal character, running through different ideas and images the way a person telling a story aloud might (as mentioned above, the novel is indeed being told aloud by Rev. Cherrycoke). Pynchon also seems to flit between his heroes’ perspectives without signaling as such. The first sentence is a neutral narrator’s description, the second seems to occupy Mason’s anxious mind as he lets it run wild with paranoia, and the third seems to switch to Dixon’s more grounded and social perspective with the colloquial “Snakes-and-Bears Jumpiness” reference. Reading Mason & Dixon is like being in three minds at once, sometimes even more. It’s not a book, for me, that can be read casually. It took me a third of a year to finish chewing it.

Yet when I read the final pages, I somehow heard the Fandom bells tolling for the first time in almost half my life. Mason and Dixon have a classic shipping dynamic: Their personalities are mirror opposites; they’re thrown into a working relationship by the whims of a higher authority; they constantly express frustration with the other, but privately they harbor admiration so intense they could never express it. Best of all, they only realize how much the other man means to them when it’s too late and their lives must begin to disentangle. It’s so juicy! The day I finished the book, I started making a playlist inspired by their friendship. It has two songs by The Mountain Goats on it. I might as well be 14 years old again.