In some ways it’s hard to imagine a less fashionable writer than Thomas Pynchon. A few decades ago, however, it would have been a challenge to name one more respected. Not long after its publication in 1973, his novel Gravity’s Rainbow was described by the critic Tony Tanner as ‘arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses’. This view became something of a critical orthodoxy. Many will have struggled to get far into the novel’s 700-plus pages – put off, perhaps, by its enormous, cartoonishly named cast and the way it seems to require prior knowledge of rocket science (the narrative revolves around the search for a secret Nazi missile programme). But going easy on the reader was certainly not the point. Alongside now rather forgotten figures such as John Barth, Pynchon was part of a peculiar turn taken in American fiction in the second half of the last century, at once highly cerebral and unabashedly wacky. The idea was less to make it new (these authors were, above all, storytellers) than to make it weird and difficult. 

By the time Pynchon published his next epic, Mason & Dixon, almost twenty-five years later, with only Vineland (1990) in between, the dazzle was wearing off. Set in the late 18th century, Mason & Dixon scrupulously recreated the knotty English prose of the period and featured, among its other amusements,