MORE than a quarter of a century has passed since Thomas Pynchon's demented post-modernist classic Gravity's Rainbow exploded on to the literary scene. A lengthy narrative centring on a wartime anti-hero whose sexual performances tend to coincide with rocket attacks, it offered the now-standard Pynchon formula of manic gags, offbeat sex, weirdos and surrealist chaos. Not that it is his first hook, or even his best - that honour still belongs to The Crying of Lot 49, his short, sharp masterpiece, published in 1965.
Pynchon had with his debut, V, (1963) already demonstrated that he knew how to write long, meandering narratives full of dazzle, outrageous puns and tricks, undisciplined digressions, dead ends and lots of hot air. Remember the alligator hunt through the New York sewers? After Gravitys Rainbow, the great man then went silent, and with silence came cultdom.
Here was a writer as reclusive as Salinger in the era of writer as marketable, public figure. There are no author photographs on his hooks. All we are allowed to know is that he was born in 1937 and may or may not have once worked for NASA. Of course the great irony remains that another American, the Swiftian satirist William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions (1955), JR (1978), Carperters Gothic (1986) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), is a satirical genius, with literary gifts far surpassing Pynchon's.
When the Joycean novel parted company with European fiction, it found a definite home in the work of Gaddis and Pynchon. Novels such as theirs require daunting linguistic and narrative control to bring off what are near-impossible feats of storytelling; Gaddis has always possessed these qualities in an abundance Pynchon has never acquired. This explains Gaddis's ability to sustain his dense, dialogue-based stories, and Pynchon's failure to convincingly carry his loose yarns to their conclusions. Yet somehow hype has always worked to Pynchon's advantage - hence his reputation.
In 1990, a 17-year silence was broken with the arrival of Vineland, a sub-Pynchonesque parody so bad that devotees hoped he had not, in fact, written it. In that novel, which satirises TV culture as well as conspiracy as a way of life, several members of the lunatic team of paranoid crazies posing as characters suffer from "tubal abuse and video-related disorders". It is a mess; repetitive, sloppily-written, self-indulgent and delivered in the casual hippie-pastiche lingo which is his preferred literary voice.
That post-publication dust is well settled. Now Pynchon has unleashed yet another bizarre tale which, as the hype maintains, has been 30 years in the making. Ah - so Vineland is an aberration?
Mason & Dixon (Cape, £16.99 in the UK) is almost 800 pages long. It has its moments, of both comedy and insight, but they are repeatedly lost amongst the debris masquerading as a narrative, shakily told by the Rev Wicks Cherrycoke some 20 years later.
INTERESTINGLY for Pynchon, it is an historical novel - or, at least it is based on events surrounding the 18th-century survey which plotted the boundary between the states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, now known as the Mason and Dixon line after the two Britons, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who carried it out.
While Pynchon adopts an engaging mock-August an prose, he somehow fails to shake off his familiar hippy pastiche. His characters are a burlesque lot, including The Learned English Dog who talks and a Robot Duck apparently obsessed with a French man. As the Beloved complains, "My social life had fallen to pieces. I could no longer show my face down at the Soupcon. The Duck was my shadow night and day. She started waking me up to criticize my attire from days before, my choice of Company, and at last, unacceptably, my Cooking. Three in the morning and we sat bickering about my Beet Quiche."
Most the jokes are like this. Pynchon repeatedly opts for the merely absurd. Under the many skirts of the day, one husband notes, a woman could be concealing anything: "contraband Tea, the fruits of Espionage, the coded fates of Nations, a moderate-sized Lover, a Bomb."
As for Mason and Dixon, well, they bicker aimlessly like an ill-matched couple and emerge as cardboard opposites. Mason "the widower with the Melancholick look" and Dixon, a hoozy Quaker from Durham; "Ale does not make me violent ... I am violent by nature. Ale-drinking, rather, slows me down, increasing the chances I'll fall asleep before I can cause too much damage." The pair first travel together to Cape Town, to witness Venus, Love Herself, travel across the sun.
Dixon, for all his loudness, displays a maverick intelligence true to Pynchon himself. Having suggested that the Americans are not British, Dixon announces "No more than the Cape Dutch are - Dutch . . . `Tis said these people keep slaves, as did our late hosts, - that they are likewise inclin'd to kill the People already living where they wish to settle."
Shades of Tristam Shandy abound. Pynchon's is a happy, likeahle hook, though lacking Sterne's superior poise and comedy. Even so, if Vineland appeared to indicate that Pynchon was spending his days watching TV, Mason & Dixon, despite its erratic grammar, multiple anachronisms and poor cameo-roles for real-life players such as Washington and Ben Franklin, betrays serious historical research, including references to Clonfert and St Brendan.
Wonder at the energy, the imagination, and the lively sense of fun; no one could dispute. Pynchon's wayward inventiveness, but lament the loss of a great opportunity. At the hidden heart of Mason & Dixon is the dark reality of slavery, itself a symbol of the enduring cultural divide between the Northern and Southern states, as well as the divide between the old World and the New, and the Age of Reason's emerging new science.
There is a good novel trapped in the belly of this dense, sprawling, ill-disciplined monster and Pynchon or his editor - does he have one? - should have given it the freedom to surface.
