Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon provides ample proof, if further proof be needed, that the most profound story in Western literature—at least so far as our cultural life is concerned—is the one about the emperor and his new clothes. It has always seemed to me that if someone writes a novel that is long, obscure, and pretentious enough, the fashionable world will rise in a body and proclaim it a masterpiece, and this is exactly what happened with Pynchon’s eight-hundred-page, all-but unreadable tome.

Henry Holt’s peppy marketing team has characterized the book with grotesque inaccuracy as being reader-friendly, a happy “buddy” story accessible not only to Pynchon-nerds but to the common reader, whoever he or she might be. Fawning reviews in the daily New York Times, the Times Book Review, and The New York Review of Books supported that specious claim, and sales boomed, making Mason & Dixonone of the most unlikely bestsellers of all time. I don’t know whether I qualify as a common reader, but I found the novel to be aggressively inaccessible, not only to myself but to each of the various highly educated people whose opinions I solicited. It’s not that any of us would be ultimately incapable of knuckling down and penetrating the gauze of obfuscation in which Pynchon delights to shroud every scene; but then again, why would we want to? The rewards are not commensurate with the effort, and there are far too many really interesting books one