Customer Reviews

Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Well, maybe not everyone. This amazing, roller-coaster ride of a read will not appeal to the conventional. The plot turns on a coming to grips with American culture by an outsider who longs to fit in. Carson's story is accessed through the characters of Gilligan's Island, providing a romp through the 20th century that is both touching and hilarious. Written with delicious Joycean wordplay the book takes us into the future lives of those on deck of The Minnow. The harrowing, raunchy, obscure and plain glass clear portrayals take the reader to the warp and woof of perhaps his/her own unexamined life.

Carson provides a genuine tour de force that does not impinge upon Fitzgerald's quest for the great American novel, while displaying tremendous grasp of popular culture, major social themes and Carson's unfailing sense of whimsy and humor. Well worth both the money and the time spent to read.

This book sorta reminds me of PALE FIRE by Nabokov. Or maybe INFINITE JEST. Or, I don't know, maybe just growing up in the 60s. If you liked those, you'll probably love this one. I only hope that Tom Carson keeps it up and writes more novels.

This book could never be made into a movie, but if it could, I'd be first in line to see it.

Midway through the first chapter I congratulated myself on a marvelous find: Carson's loony bin was as funny as his wordplay was riotous. But alas, the second chapter employed a different narrator and a much less exuberant, less zany style, the third even less so, and so on. By final count only one other chapter ("Professor X") had equalled the first. Bear in mind that parody and satire--not to mention humor itself--are very difficult genres to sustain in prose; one marvels and savors when it is done well. ... I consider my money well-spent, even for two hilarious chapters out of seven. In today's publishing climate, one takes what one can get.
By the way, more literary types may enjoy Carson's play on "The Great Gatsby" (Chapter IV) and other, subtler forms of parody here, which I found prolonged and tedious, and many readers have obviously eaten the whole book with relish. I say good for them. If you like political and social satire, are a fan of Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, you'll probably finish the book and enjoy all of it. If you want and expect to be dazzled by a book that compares itself implicitly to Joyce while manifesting a humor as dense as a Woody Allen in top form, two chapters may alone be worth the fare.

Gilligan's Wake is not for the faint of heart. It is, however, one terrific novel, full of brilliant, inspired (by pop culture) prose that will wow you if you are ready for it. There is no plot in the novel, per se, but rather a story that keeps recurring in an almost dream-like fashion in the ramblings of the various characters who mirror those of the Gilligan's Island sit com. Gilligan's Wake is a weird, experimental novel and if that's not for you, well, try another novel. But, if that is for you, pick this one up--it's great.

Both five-star and one-star ratings are easy to understand for "Gilligan's Wake". The novel can be quite clever and funny and observant, a real piece of work. It can also be wandering off-topic, bizarre and unfunny. Thus, I come down with a nice ambivalent bipolar middle.

If you aren't a baby boomer or thereabouts, consider skipping this one. The book will be hopeless without a good grasp of standard cultural references for boomers, as well as many others of far more obscurity. I can only wonder how many more I missed, rather like reading some dense Russian fiction and blowing by some finer points or background that you had no idea you were expected to know.

The first chapter on Maynard / Gilligan was so extreme in its pop references that I almost bailed, despite the "beat" cleverness, as the prose teetered on excess. Fortunately, the chapter on the Skipper rescued me from that island. Stuck in the Pacific during WW II with Nixon, JFK and McHale of "McHale's Navy", the Skipper gets by, with a poignant conclusion that he would never really be anybody, no matter what he did, in contrast to the effortless future of JFK.

The next three were stronger than the trailing two. Mr. Howell stumbles mostly cluelessly through life doing little, living off the fruits of others, intersecting with Alger Hiss. Carson's spin on vacuity was slick.

Mrs. Howell as a pal of fictional Daisy Buchanan, negotiating a temporary lesbian affair and regular morphine use, was quite surprising. It worked better than expected, with another largely empty life as a hook for considerable social observation.

Ginger's tour from Alabama to porn star to the Rat Pack was almost feasible, and Carson gave her enough skills and brains not to be just a dumb redhead with crash-inducing curves. Unsurprisingly, Mary-Ann watches one of Ginger's movies, in one of the many cross-references.

Professor X's story could easily have been the best, with some exceptional content, what with X on the Manhattan Project. So that's why we bombed Nagasaki, eh? Very funny! Carson went overboard on the Professor's involvement in everything, but the real dislike was his sexual escapades with deformed members of either sex. No thanks.

Mary-Ann's character didn't mesh with what I felt her style should be like as the All-American girl. The summer at the Sorbonne was ok, despite Carson's overuse of untranslated French, allowing for some reflection on what it meant to be American. Her story had its moments, undermined by a scrambled timeline, her hometown as Brigadoon and her regenerative virginity. Clearly I prefer my content played a little straighter. Perhaps I'm about on par with Mary-Ann herself, who in the novel's wind-up, seems to grasp some essential conclusions without really knowing quite what to know.

I always get nervous around metafiction, fearing that the author will be so taken up with his/her own brilliance that s/he will forget the narrative line. That doesn't happen here. I found this strangely compelling, and was unable to put it down. The pop culture references are very funny while at the same time insightful. This wasn't the light vacation read I was hoping for, but I think it's been one step better -- it's made me think.