/lit/ - Literature

Holy shit. Just finished this. No wonder Bloom called it the best novel the 20th century.

What really struck me is how pure-hearted and beautiful this turned out to be. After reading V and GR, I assumed Pynchon was a cynical horny albeit brilliant edgelord who had no faith in human progress. (GR honestly might be the most misanthropic novel I've read.) So for him to lay out a sentimental and Quixotic tale of camaraderie and scientific progress in early America with such beauty and conviction blew me away.

The parts where Mason and Dixon go tavern hopping or discover those extraterrestrial mounds or encounter the mechanical duck radiate this purity of adventure and optimism that I've gotten from few other novels. The final chapter of part two, where Rev Cherrycoke imagines M&D extending the Line into the Atlantic and settling there forever as friends, legitimately made me cry. It was such an overwhelming aesthetic experience I ended up reading it all in a couple days.

Very curious what people think about the ending. Seeing the two settle into mundane life as industrialization takes over Europe and Dixon succumbs to illness was such a depressing comedown from the high of their mystical journey out West. And the final conversation between Mason and Ben Franklin is wrought with so much cryptic shit. Is the "Engine" Mason senilely warns Frankling about just the American continent once totally mapped and colonized? It feels like Mason is foreshadowing all of GR, namely the foreclosure of death in a corporatized technocratic security state.

Gonna let this sit with me for a while, but right now it feels like my favorite novel ever. Pynchon has such a strong and singular historical worldview it's almost contagious.

>"We can get jobs," said William, "save enough to go out where you were,-- "
>"Marry and go out where you were," said Doc.
>"The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope."
>"The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick."
>"We'll go there. We'll live there."
>"We'll fish there. And you too."
I didn't want it to be over, bros. I wanted their imaginary journey where the Line continues forever to be true.

>a talking dog
What the fuck was Pynchon thinking? This is stupid.