Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Toto...I think we're in America
Review: 'Gilliagn's Wake' by Tom Carson is either a self-absorbed, self-righteous diatribe disguised by hipster cool references, or it's one of the great epic allegories about what it should mean to be an American.

My vote is on the latter.

The book is like an onion. Peeling away each layer only presents you with more layers to with which to deal. I doubt that I will be able to understand all the references - and I pride myself on being the culture-vulture (always get the free drinks in the bar trivia games, I do.)

So, what do we have here?

Imagine if you will, a discouse on the history of the United States in the 20th Century. A history that is also a reflection on the weight of the mantle of becoming and enduring as agreat power. A reflection that is, perhaps, darkened by the fact that we're not living up to all we can be. Why? Well, think of Lord Acton's comment, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That''s what Mr. Carson presents to us. A homily on how we are in dreadful danger of lettting the last best hope slip away. He screams at us to not let it happen.

But, instead of presenting this in a conventional manner - something Paul Kennedy did with "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: 1500 - 2000", Mr. Carson elects to follow the revolutionary approach of using that which we are as a weapon against ourselves.

It's written in a prose style that is Joycean, but also holds elements of Marxian fervor (Groucho, not Vladimir), along with Lennonesque puns, and maybe even Faulkner-like stream of conscious ramblins.

America's histiory is told within the context of its culture...more precisely, it's pop culture. The story comes out in seven narratives. Each describes a piece of the whole, through interaction with events and persons.

The seven narrators are very, very familar to us. maybe more familiar than the so-called famous people with whom the interact. Who are they?

A former PT boat captain now running a day-cruise service.
A rich couple.
A movie actress.
A scientist.
A young woman.

And - very briefly - a possibly insane young man named Gil.

Their stories depict their actions, to be sure. But, more importantly, they also depict the story of America's actions, whether good or bad, whether well intentioned or selfish.

It's not always a pretty picture, we - as a people - have some things of which we should be ashamed. But, we have more, much more, of which we should be proud. proud enough to go on to redress the wrongs.

And, at the end, when another symbol is brought before us - and we see she is in distress and needs our help - you cannot help but wonder at how much the author loves his country and wants to make it all that it can and should be.

Rating:
Summary: Sit right back and enjoy a tale
Review: First, I have to say MY pet peeve are those that don't actually read a book and feel entitled to review it. Tom Carson has written about the U.S. and its cultural history 'through the glass darkly.' I haven't yet picked up all of its many layered jokes and allusions, and I've read it twice already(and am working on the third!) Each time it's better and funnier. By exploring the culture of the U.S. using Gilligans' Island characters, Mr. Carson sets his many jokes and observations within the biggest joke/observation of all: Americans' use of something simplistic (like a sitcom) to confront something as complex as the enigma of 20th Century American culture. This may be the most American trait of all! Although the 'Ginger' character is the most spot-on, the Thurston Howell character makes me laugh and think the most. His over-educated oblivion puts the perfect twist on the TV character, making him just as obnoxious but with new depth. And the Acheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe joke is terrific. Of course, so is the joke "Hello Nurse"!, and MaryAnn's 'pissed-off' anti-French diatribe, and the great allusion to the Who with "a bad girl--to be a mad girl, between blue thighs," and . . . !!!

Rating:
Summary: Very interesting.... and readable!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Can you trivialize a sitcom as silly as 'Gilligan's Island'?
Review: I really enjoyed parts of this book, but in the end, I think Carson makes the mistake of trying to make it all mean too much. The triumph of the book lies in the details of the bringing to life and re-imagining of the castaways and their alternative tours of the century(As a DC native, I also appreciated some of the local color) Unfortunately, when the mythic archetype stuff appears, it gets old fast. The characters are overwhelmed at the end, and degenerate into mouthpieces for the author. My sympathy and interest were lost.

Definitely worth reading, but don't get your hopes up as you go along. A good example of this type of book done better was "Gould's Book of Fish".

Rating:
Summary: can't get enough of the rat pack
Review: Nashville City Paper BookClub Column - May 27, 2004

If you cannot get enough of the Rat Pack then select Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson (Picador). The writer deftly uses his background as a columnist for The Village Voice and Esquire to infuse his novel with characters famous in our pop culture.

Saralee Terry Woods is President of BookMan/BookWoman Books in Nashville, and Larry D. Woods is an attorney

Rating:
Summary: Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Very very very very very very funny. And smart.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Boomer History
Review: You might be attached to this title by the lush cover art featuring a Vargas-like redhead in recline. But do crack open the cover and read a few pages. Tom Carson combines one of America's favorite television shows of all time with high and lows of the 20th century in what may or may not be our America.

Now the cautions. Fans who adore the show Gilligan's Island may be very upset or dismayed by Carson's take on their beloved favorites. If you are easily upset or can't bear to see the characters in unflattering lights and tales, please do the following. Put the pretty book down. Move alway slowly. This is not the book for you. Read Dawn Wells or Tina Louise's memoirs.

Okay, it had to be said. Now for those willing to push aside their illusions, in each story (one per castaway) one thing remains true, Gilligan or any variants of the name mean trouble.

In the first story, the narrator is in a rest (mental) home with a resident who may or may not be Gilligan himself.

A debutante who becomes this universe's Lovely Howell meets and is drawn into the shadow world of a Sapphic Daisy Buchanan.

A man in the Navy has an encounter with the young John F. Kennedy in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

An upper class man with dulled wits encounters Alger Hiss and his mysterious assistant.

A red-headed, buxom beauty from a Gothic Southern family escapes to California and becomes a movie star of sorts, only to be escliped by her vile sister.

A young scientist cuts a swath through the shadow goverment, addicted to a mysterious drug and faces the end result of the horror he's inflicted over the years.

A sweet young woman leaves her idyllic, Brigadoon-like hometown for the Sorbonne and Paris to discover no matter who she loves, her virginity remains intact in the morning.

The stories are slightly uneven in tone. But the better stories, the would be Professor and the Mr Howell tales require mutiple readings, the Internet and a pad of paper to be savored to their fullest. Do take the time to read all the stories more than once. On my first reading I would have give the overall result a single star. Even the weakest stories have layers and references to make the reader think again and want to take a second read.