Like its namesake, Finnegans Wake, this is a language novel. It's funny and it's brilliant. Besides the obvious title allusion to Joyce, it may also be dream. The frantic energy of it reminds one of Pynchon. Portions of it also remind me of Gilbert Sorrentino, especially those parts suggesting humble background aspiring to be learned and intellectual, a human trait he was a master of. In an afterword Carson pays a debt to Calder Willingham. He's a favorite of mine, but I didn't detect him here. Do you remember the television sitcom that ran several seasons during the 60s about a band of castaways on an island? We loved those chatracters. We enjoyed their antics week after week. But they had lives before they were stranded by the wreck of the S. S. Minnow. And it's those earlier lives Carson writes about. Gilligan is in transition from the character Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (remember that one?) to Gilligan's Island. He winds up in the mental ward of the Mayo Clinic with Holden Caulfield, Ira Hayes (the famous flag raising on Iwo Jima is a recurring theme) and Nixon. The Skipper's previous experience was in the South Pacific during the war serving in a PT boat squadron with John F Kennedy and McHale. Thurston Howell was a scion of a wealthy New York family. Lovey, his wife, was a bisexual lover of Daisy Buchanan and a heroin addict. Ginger travels from Alabama to Hollywood trying to make it in the movies. The Professor worked on the Manhattan Project. Later he surreptitiously suggested the CIA to Truman and, along with Roy Cohn, controlled the government through a web of shadow authority. Mary-Ann grew up in Russell, Kansas where she knew the Baums, Dorothy, and Bob Dole, later traveled to Paris and an affair with Jean-Luc Godard. So you see Carson gives us characters quite different and more morally complex than the zany, lovable castaways we watched during their heyday on television. Carson gives us postmodernism and satire. To populate a novel with characters like these is to progress naturally into satirical use of them. In fact, this is one of those novels in which the characters become aware they inhabit a construct controlled by an author and are being used to make larger statements. Toward the end I began to feel that one of the things Carson's novel is about is America. It'd been building for 250 pages toward the moment when you realize Mary-Ann is not only a stand-in for the Virgin Mary waiting for the moment of the birth which whe knows is her duty but is also the personification of America and is the focal point the other narrations, perhaps especially the Professor's and the Skipper's, have been pointing. All the mythologies Gilligan's Wake and Gilligan's Island present are equal in the end. This was a reread. I'd first read it in 2003. In a year in which I'm trying to be constantly rereading something, this will probably turn out to be a highlight. For one thing, it's astonishingly fun to read. The novel's wordplay at its best, professional wordplay. And that energy, just like the dust lanes in our galaxy spawns stars, creates the verbal moments from which come the constellations of puns and cultural references filling the book. This is tour de force, this is high wire without a net. This is a 337-page prose poem. Few novelists can write like this. Robert Coover. Gilbert Sorrentino. Thomas Pynchon. Tom Carson.
Hello James Joyce-influence! There is something to be said for being the same age as the author of something like this book, because, even if you don't get the plot completely nailed down, you at least understand the allusions and puns. For example, from the first section:Rats were patrolling Room 222, gunsmoke made the sea be yesterday, oh Dr. Kildare F. Troop I'm on to you: I know what the Mayo Clinic is.... When dawn wells up in the sky, she knots me together. Then we'd sit around in the Cleaver Ward in our robes and gowns.... The one across from us was called the Burt Ward, and every schizo in it wore a mask and hopped around like batty robins.OK? Count the pop-culture references: I find at least 9, with a couple others buzzing around the perimeter that I can't place. But do you see what I mean about the plot? To be fair, this is the least intelligible chapter, kind of like someone who has done nothing but watch TV his entire life would sound like if you took him out of his living room. The bones of this book are the seven characters on Gilligan's Island, appearing in the same order as the song: Gilligan, the Skipper, the Millioinaire, his wife, the movie star, the professor, Mary Ann. Kind of deflating:- Gilligan's nuts, as is obvious from the quote above- the Skipper is living in the past (World War II to be exact, where he meets JFK)- the Millionaire is entirely clueless (recommended Alger Hiss for a government job even though he knew Hiss was a Communist...)- his wife was a morphine addict in the 20s who married Thurston as a backstop when her father died- the Movie Star is from "Alabam'-goddamn" and is actually a B- and X-rated movie star whose biggest claim to fame is sleeping with Sammy Davis, Jr., in Sinatra's house in Palm Springs while her sister did JFK in the pool- the Professor...one of the characters I liked best on the show--is a narcissistic sex-addict who worked on the Manhattan Project and other creepily nefarious underground government programs- Mary Ann is a perpetual virgin who left home for a year of college in France where she lost her virginity...the first time...and can't get back to her Kansas home because it's Brigadoon, so she just keeps wandering the globe losing her virginity time after timeConfused yet? This is definitely a book to read again, more closely, if I had time. I'd skip the Movie Star and Professor chapters because they were terminally depressing. Intricate book, good for book clubs, if you have a group that's pretty avant.
Do You like book Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (2003)?
First-rate wordplay and outstanding mindbendery in evidence, but narratively nothing particularly interesting past the p68 point. Strained pastiche, overly long surreal dream sequences, a Pynchonian tedium for neolonames-as-characters that disappear when the sentence ends, and an absence of any tangible through-plot bogs down one’s pleasure. Too much reliance on unfunny dialogue and bland satire also kissed this reader goodbye. Cover is one of the ugliest around too. But Carson can work words: no dispute. The curious might consult this soapbox gush.
—MJ Nicholls
I was just reminded of this novel by a friend who posted that today (9/26/2014) is the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast episode of 'Gilligan's Island,' so I dug into Amazon where I see that my 1/31/2003 review of 'Gilligan's Wake' - probably the first Amazon review I wrote - was featured. Here it is:(Five Stars) Joycean ride for nondublinersI 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 for 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 1904 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.Now I want to read it again.
—R.d. Mumma
From what I recall, this was quite a head trip. Carson takes the characters from Gilligan's Island and plugs them in as general representations of the American post-war psyche. Gilligan exploring the sub-culture...the booze and morphine addled Howells losing their grip and seeing their world become less relevant...star struck Ginger looking for her 15 minutes of fame...Mary Ann attempting to lose her innocence...the Skipper recalling his glory days and the Professor-as-Smoking-Man on the X-Files.Who knew this could work as a story? But the combination of the hopelessly banal and shallow Gilligan characters awash in sleaze, sex, power plays and amoral actions is good twisted fun.
—Lori
