Charles Mason, astronomer, and Jeremiah Dixon, surveyor, travel to America to draw the line that will bear their names and divide the nation. Pynchon writes in eighteenth-century English, complete with capitalized Nouns and long Sentences, and the novel is digressive, hallucinatory, and strangely moving. A talking dog appears. A giant cheese. The Line they draw will become the boundary between slave states and free. Pynchon never gives interviews; his reclusiveness is legendary. The novel is his most human work, a friendship at its center, America's original sin at its edges. They drew a Line. It is still there.