Mason and Dixon.

THIS may not be the most promising way to begin a book review, but I should admit at the outset that I haven't exactly read the novel under discussion. Or rather, I read the first fifty pages and then gave up, having found nothing in the plot, the characters, or the style to warrant my reading seven hundred pages more. I feel it necessary to be as candid as possible about this because, as I hope to show, I believe a certain mendacity has surrounded the book's critical reception. For me at least the real interest of Mason & Dixon lies not in its claims to literary brilliance, but in its status as part of a new trend in contemporary fiction.

I am speaking of the recent rash of long books, big books, heavy, boring, and unwieldy books. It is books of this sort that critics like to describe by weighing them and measuring the width of their spines. Mason & Dixon, in case anyone cares, weighs in at three pounds and its spine is roughly two and a half inches wide. One critic liked the book so much that he judged its spine to be actually three inches wide, an illusion doubtless aided by the publisher's decision to use the heaviest paper on hand, thus making the book appear even more impressive. If only it had reached the three-inch mark, it could have done battle with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Harold Brodkey's The Runaway Soul, leaving William Gass's The Tunnel in a risible fourth place. In contemporary criticism, clearly, width has usurped the place of wit.

Now whereas some authors of long books, like Gass, occasionally lapse into lucidity, others, like Brodkey, Wallace, and Pynchon, write books so leaden and so intractably obscure that I doubt any honest person could claim to read them with pleasure. The acrobatic efforts of certain critics to stay awake throughout Mason & Dixon recall nothing so much as the contest in the second book of Pope's Dunciad. While two authors drone on remorselessly, reading from their interminable tomes, the goddess Dulness issues this challenge to the assembled critics: "If there be man who o'er such works can wake,/Sleep's all-subduing charms who dares defy/. . . To him we grant our amplest powers to sit/Judge of all present, past, and future wit."

Ostensibly Mason & Dixon is an "historical novel" about those two surveyors who achieved immortality by dividing the continental United States into North and South. If that sounds like an unpromising premise for a novel, it is indeed. Things are not helped by the fact that Mr. Pynchon's idea of character consists in making everyone sound vaguely piratical, with cutesy period punctuation that is certain to defeat most readers' efforts at decipherment. Something of the tenor of the dialogue will be gleaned from one character's assertion that "Flamsteed, paronomastickally disposed, called [a certain star] Tropus, because it marked the turning point in the Summer Solstice." To which another replies, "Although that Point presently lies somewhat to the east." This is the sort of pastiche that passes for priceless erudition today, although any man of the eighteenth century would have choked on his tongue before using "presently" to mean "at present."

As for wit, the book is almost mantrically described as Shandean, though one occasionally hears mention of Swift and Shaw as well. Yet it is hard to see what such eponyms could possibly have to do with scenes in which one of General Washington's black slaves speaks to him in Yiddish, causing the great man to remark, "You see what I have to put up with? It's makin' me just mee-shugginah." This gem is from a scene that T. Coraghessan Boyle, writing in the New York Times Book Review, calls "side-splitting." As for those who will find humor when one of the characters is squashed under a massive wheel of cheese, I can only wish them well.

The strange thing is that, despite the unanimity of acclaim that this dud of a book has enjoyed, I suspect that I am not alone in finding Mason & Dixon unreadable. If you read between the lines of the reviews, it is pretty clear that many if not most of the critics essentially hated the book. Thus when Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times calls it "Alternately dazzling and vexing, tiresome and amazing," she means, if I may paraphrase with illiberal abandon, that it is tiresome and vexing. Similarly, when she calls it "plotted and plotless," she means that it is plotless. Then there is the gambit of turning its manifest faults into virtues. According to Miss Kakutani, "Its flaws are exuberant flaws of excess." Better still, "its density and garrulity [impress] upon the reader a sense of the arduousness of Mason and Dixon's journey and the long aching curve of their lives." Which, of course, is a nice way of saying that the book is boring. Even its most stalwart boosters must acknowledge this tedium. According to Luc Sante, in an otherwise fawning review in New York magazine, the book "will find buyers who will open it, turn one or two of its pages with forceps, and then leave it to molder prominently on a table in the side parlor." This seems so likely a prospect that I can only suppose the ejaculatory Mr. Boyle, when he speaks of the novel's "sheer entertainment value," to be simply lying through his teeth.

Why is it, some readers will ask, that these critics are so reverent toward Mason & Dixon, when they were cool toward Pynchon's previous novel, Vineland, seven years ago? The reason is that the earlier novel was far more conven- tional, and thus somewhat more readable. Because it was (relatively) clear, shorn of the author's habitual obscurantism, everyone could see his garbled syntax, his tin ear for dialogue, his dopey sense of humor, his inability to create convincing characters.

Yet it deserves to be asked why we imagine that weight and depth are present in the most obscure works of an author who, when speaking clearly, reveals that he has little if anything to say. One recalls in this connection the observation of Tacitus that "Omne ignotum pro magnifico": Whatever is obscure is highly held. Furthermore, if one has not actually quite, you know, read the book, it is safer to praise it than to criticize. Otherwise one lays oneself open to being challenged on some point one has not encountered. Far better to say with Luc Sante that the book is "way too vast and densely populated with ideas and lightning bolts for a short review to do it any kind of justice. All I can do is doff my cap."

Some books -- and I strongly suspect that Mason & Dixon, Infinite Jest, and The Runaway Soul are examples of this -- can be seen as massive opera intended not to be read. They are stunts and causes celcbres, designed so that everyone will talk about them but no one will actually have the stamina to read them through. Some critics will have the honesty to admit that the work is unreadable, but most will not. What is really pernicious about this critical betrayal is not that those who deserve censure are praised, but that novelists who labor to be clear are liable to be dismissed. In other words, some critics are so far gone that the simple fact of their understanding what is going on in a novel is sufficient reason to consider it unworthy of praise.

This is precisely what William Shakespeare meant when, in Sonnet 66, he lamented "Simple Truth miscalled Simplicitie." In part he was rebelling, I like to think, against such works as John Lyly's obscure Euphues, which was held highly by the literary culture of the time, but which the wisdom of sub- sequent generations has commended to uncontested oblivion. It is a fair guess that a similar fate awaits some of the idols of the present literary scene, the very second they lose the allure of their newness.