So much of the pleasure is at the level of the sentence, hopping from stop to stop and seeing that it's not only all there but it's all in order too. Reading 'Mason & Dixon' (and its underappreciated successor 'Against the Day') I thrill to the syntax of a writer gifted, inventive and artful enough to be able to keep everything in. I often feel like that, though I usually spare myself the embarrassment and my editors the necessity. I took more delight in that first sentence than I think I've probably taken from most of the novels I've read since the whole of the book fulfilled the promise of its opening, particularly in its comic timing and the kindly warmth of spirit that discreetly infuses it. 'Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins.' and we're off. Novels went on as long they liked.Įxuberantly upholding that tradition at the end of the 20th century, Thomas Pynchon's 'Mason & Dixon' begins with a sentence not of 140 characters but 120 words, and continues in the same vein for nearly 800 pages. But 18th-century texts did not confine themselves to 140 characters or fewer. In his current incarnation as a celebrated virtuoso of Twitter (commanding over 14,000 followers at the time of writing), Dr Samuel Johnson has cannily matched the struck poses, the snorted expostulations and the triumphant aphorisms of his century's discourse to the frame of the tweet.

Mason dixon pynchon