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Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair--one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic--from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

"Let's see now. Fervent consumption of mood-altering substances...a certain reckless vigor in the expression of opinion...pothead humor...It all sounds rather like the '60s of more recent memory. And that (as old-timey Communists used to say, and militia folk still do) is no accident!"

Scott McLemee, Salon

"Very grand and mad and beautiful....I can't even remember having reviewed a more original novel."

Philip Hensher, Spectator, 05/03/1997

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