Reception
Mason & Dixon was one of the most acclaimed novels of the 1990s. According to prominent American critic Harold Bloom, "Pynchon always has been wildly inventive, and gorgeously funny when he surpasses himself: the marvels of this book are extravagant and unexpected." Harold Bloom has also called the novel "Pynchon's masterpiece to date." English author John Fowles, writing in The Spectator said of the book "As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces." T. Coraghessan Boyle of The New York Times Book Review wrote, "This is old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all, Mason & Dixon is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature," New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said, "A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring... a book that testifies to Pynchon's remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller."
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)