Every so often, when it becomes all too easy to feel smug about what I think I know -- when I start to imagine, say, Larry the Cable Guy as the monster in some Stephen King story, his backwoods cabin/torture chamber/abattoir full of the remains of his latest victims -- then I know it's been way too long since I last read a good novel. So I've finally pulled Tom Carson's GILLIGAN'S WAKE (Picador, 2003, 0-312-31114-1) from one of the stacks on the floor, and spent a rather enjoyable week reading it.

As you suspected from the title, it's a very American riff on FINNEGANS WAKE: seven sly, punning monologues by a familiar cast of characters, recounting the parts they played in the unfolding of the American Century. Here, the Skipper commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific, where he met a young naval officer named Jack Kennedy; the Millionaire, born to a life of privileged cluelessness, helped Communist sympathizer Alger Hiss to become a Washington insider; his wife, the Heiress, hung out with Daisy Buchanan, discovering narcotics and lesbianism in the roaring '20s.

The Actress -- arguably the smartest of the group -- posed for fetish photos with Bettie Page, and went on to a B-movie "career" before winding up on an insipid TV sitcom; the Professor was quietly instrumental in creating the CIA and the NSA before going to work for political fixer Roy Cohn; an exchange student named Mary-Ann Kilroy comes back from a memorable summer in Paris to learn that she's anything but a typical girl from small-town Kansas. And a San Francisco beatnik poet named Maynard G. Krebs wakes up in the Mayo Clinic with a new name and a small hat, stumbling through all the other characters' stories in various, unfailingly awkward, guises. (Another recurring character is Richard Nixon, who clearly occupies the lowest circle in Tom Carson's Hell.)

Giving us a kaleidoscopic tour of 20th century American history, politics, art, literature, and pop culture, the novel has a grand old time lobbing its endless in-jokes at the reader, just for the fun of keeping us on our toes. The sub-Joycean wordplay, at its most freewheeling in the Krebs/Gilligan chapter, indulges our fancy on how Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot might've shared an issue of TV Guide:

"The elevator at the end of the hall was the size of a phone booth, but must have been capacious for all that: "Max. 99" read the sign on its wall. Stepping out, I interrogated a couple of loafers: Who is the third son who walks always beside you? I was still hoping to find Suze, but Vic Morrow and vic morrow and vicmorrow kept me in this petty place from day to day. 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..."

Are these seven stranded castaways up to carrying the weight of American ambition, pride, arrogance, and disillusionment? Of course not, but it's still a fun and stimulating read.


https://www.amazon.com/Gilligans-Wake-Novel-Tom-Carson/dp/0312311141/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GKDJDELF9ZIV&dchild=1&keywords=gilligans+wake&qid=1631594013&s=books&sr=1-1