25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Joycean ride for nondubliners, January 31, 2003
This review is from: Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (Hardcover)
I just finished this guilty pleasure on the train to work this morning. I read and enjoy a lot of books, but I never feel the need to comment immediately to the Amazonian public about them. This is one that I'd hate to see slip quietly below the radar in the flood of new novels.
It's not just a pop culture pastiche I've seen it described as; it's a very heartfelt picture of the world that those of us who grew up in the second half of the American century. If you've ever read "Ulysses" wishing that you had more firsthand experience with the streets of 1903 Dublin, or tried to read "Finnegans Wake" wishing that you had a better working knowledge of Norwegian puns, this is the book for you (assuming of course, you owned a TV, were aware of current events and maybe read some T.S. Eliot and had a few years of French).
Here's proof once again that St. James of Dublin (Trieste, Paris and Zurich) was not a dead end for literature, but a new beginning.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, February 13, 2004
Six years before she stepped onto the SS Minnow for that three-hour tour, Mary-Ann in Paris struggled to explain America in the 20th Century to her paramour Jean-Luc Goddard, the father of French cinema verite. "There's something so sweet about it, so nice you wouldn't believe it - no matter how many dumb mistakes we ever made, maybe because the sweetness makes it so easy to forget them. And I guess we always thought the sweetness would make up for the mistakes as far as all the rest of you were concerned too."
In his novel Gilligan's Wake, Tom Carson uses his skill as a writer on pop culture and politics (for the Village Voice and LA Weekly) to capture the American Century. He gives each of the seven castaways a chapter to express a nation's history and meaning in their own voice and their own lives. Each tells how the weather started getting rough long before the fateful trip.
The tale of our castaways begins, as the old chantey goes, with the first mate. Gilligan is committed to the Cleaver Ward of the Mayo psychiatric hospital, insisting that he is Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis' beatnik friend. In his lunatic ranting, he tells Dr. Kildare F. Troop, Nurse Julia, and his roommate Holden Caulfield about living in San Francisco and hobnobbing with Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Jasper Johns.
The Skipper recollects his wartime antics off the South Pacific islands of Tallulabonka and Fondawonda with fellow PT-boat skippers McHale and Kennedy, all the while resented by the supply officer and shore rat "Nick." "Nick," by the way, becomes the unpleasant junior Congressman from California who "nailed Alger Hiss," the Groton classmate of Thurston Howell. The kindly, clueless millionaire reminisces how over a lunch of moose-and-squirrel hash, Alger prevailed upon him to secure him his first Washington job.
Alice is a much darker character than the Lovey Howell she eventually becomes. Daughter of an emotionally distant suffragette, she idles away the 1920's as a morphine addicted debutante flapper along with her (very) intimate Daisy Buchanan. Daisy, widowed by Tom's accident on the polo field, is writing her own book about Gatsby, portraying him not as a tragic hero with soaring dreams but rather as "a tyrant and a dictator who carries your head around on a stick even though he calls it his banner, because he's in love with himself but he can never admit that, and so he makes you his idol and loves himself, adores himself, worships himself for having one." A refreshing 21st century take on the 20th's most analyzed literary character that's pretty spot on.
Ginger, more so the Tina Louise from God's Little Acre than the Monroe Doctrine, is the most self aware of the seven. She hops a Greyhound from "Alabam'-don't-give-a-damn" to Hollywood, where she sleeps her way to the middle. At one point, she finds herself kicked out of Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs house by a finger-snapping gold necklaced Sammy Davis, Jr., whom she (somewhat) inadvertently calls "Samby" after "the most amazing ninety-two minutes in my far from inconsiderable experience as a mistress of the horizontal arts."
Ginger's sexual exploits pale next to those of the Professor, who unashamedly reveals himself a narcissistic Dr. Strangelove. After a macabre game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey at Los Alamos in which he steers a blindfolded Oppenheimer toward Nagasaki on a wall map, thereby sealing the fate of an entire city, he joins Roy Cohn and Henry Kissinger in an ultra-covert organization. His resume of sinister schemes includes the Suez Canal crisis, the animatronic Gerald Ford, and the deflowering of young girls and boys.
The real story, however, is Mary-Ann's. She tells of growing up in Russell, Kansas, where her mother, widowed by the Battle of Iwo Jima, is the librarian, and the young yet avuncular County Attorney Bob Dole greets her every morning on Main Street. Her escape to Paris for a summer program at the Sorbonne precipitates a series of epiphanies (or in her words "unveilings") that inexorably lead her to that uncharted desert isle.
The castaways' tales jump about in time, jumbling and spiraling in on historical events both infamous and obscure. Much like Joseph Heller's Catch-22, dozens of narrative threads weave into the tapestry that covers an era. "If we were a medieval morality play," Mary-Ann ponders, "our names would be Youth, Clumsiness, Wealth, Cowardice, Hubba-Hubba, and Self-Love. Plus I, Mary-Ann, who am or may be all these things." Indeed, they provide comfort and definition as personifications of America. Or as Ginger (who turns out to be the smart one) philosophically speculates after 40 years on the island, are they an incarnation that became a refuge, or a refuge that became an incarnation?
Mary-Ann unknowingly provides one answer (after wandering the island and finding a pig's head on a stick). "Even before we washed up here, people always said our century had packed in more horrors that any other... The country that all seven of us came from fought some horrors and inflicted others, while being spared most of the worst." But no longer. Looking ahead for a long, long time, they'll have to make the best of things. It's an uphill climb.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Desert Island Book, February 25, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (Hardcover)
I loved this book. Tom Carson doesn't merely joke about pop culture, he creates one of the most dazzling examples of it. This book is both high literature and low culture, ambitious and funny (if a little over the top), and his command of the stuff of The American Century (trash TV, cultish European movies, literary figures, Hollywood and Washington, DC) is so masterful that he often makes you look at the objects that comprise it in a whole new way. this is the book every American studies student wishes he in his or her head. It's a whirlwind of brilliantly evoked voices (Lovey Howell's chapter in particular) and references, but they all come together in a way that is resonant, powerful and, in the end, very moving.
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