Gilligan's Wake Book

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.

Rereading in 2019. A recurring phrase of Finnegans Wake is "There's lots of fun at Finnegan's wake." It's true of Gilligan's Wake, too. Finished again and enjoyed again. What stands out this reading is a hive of allusion. Each of the characters is in some small way a part of every chapter. Gilligan, in his direct presentation near the end but also in all the various anagrams and personifications of his name, is the most obvious. I think each character hides in every chapter to be discovered by the reader. Another thing I noticed was that Carson carefully distinguishes the 20th century from our current century, solidifying in my mind the idea that what this savage, penetrating satire is about is America--and more, the America of our time, our lives.

But I'm gobsmacked again. Sometimes I think it more clever than brilliant, other times more brilliant than clever. Every time I read it I'm astonished. Every time I read it, in whatever year, I always finish feeling it's one of the best books I read in that year. I'm always glad I reread it.