Tom Carson's Gilligan's Wake

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In the opening pages of Tom Carson's novel, Gilligan's Wake, the title character explains how he and his girlfriend used to perform literary remodeling jobs, replacing the details of a favorite novel with details drawn from "TV shows, other books, news of the day - to make it refer to our shared text, and so to us." And as it turns out, this is basically the strategy Carson employs in Gilligan's Wake - so unless you used to date him, you may find his novel's relentless allusiveness rough going. Reread between the lines a bit, though, and it all begins to come together. And if you're of a certain age and media-saturated sensibility, you will probably recognize Gilligan's Wake as a text you share in too.

An award-winning critic who writes about TV and movies for Esquire magazine, Carson channel-surfs 20th century America via a high concept that sounds like a Cultural Studies thesis in search of a bong: Gilligan's Wake is divided into seven chapters; each chapter is narrated by a Gilligan's Island castaway; the seven castaways all have marginally momentous stories to tell, because they'd all been Gumping their way through history prior to their fateful excursion on the S.S. Minnow.

Indeed, the cameos occurs so frequently that Gilligan's Wake sometimes reads as if the Love Boat, rather than the Minnow, is its muse. Thurston Howell is pals with Alger Hiss. Ginger jangles new beau Sammy Davis Jr. while her sister john-effs a future president in Frank Sinatra's pool. Richard Nixon serves burgers to the Skipper in a Navy mess shack, then continues to pop up in the book's different stories. But even more than star turns, wordplay's the thing here, and remakes and remixes of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, The Great Gatsby, The Day of the Locust, and countless other works thicken the novel's syntax as well as its plot.

While the seven castaways already hail from good sitcom stock, Carson archetypecasts them even further. The Professor is U.S. foreign policy incarnate, a vain satyr whose self-regard is so impervious to external feedback he thinks he's giving his victims a benevolent taste of his bounty when in fact he's raping them. Ginger is Hollywood made silicone, a slutty semaphore who never quite realizes her potential because her fans are determined to keep her exactly as she is: sweetly accomodating, a little bit vulgar, more pliant than a Barbie Doll but not quite as real. Mary-Ann is America personified, Old Glory as corn-fed co-ed, sweet, wholesome, and eager to see the world, yet afflicted with a "special astigmatism" that keeps any evidence of troubling American imperialism in convenient soft-focus.

Their separate stories, which detail everything from Mrs. Howell's Jazz Age flirtations with lesbianism and morphine to the Professor's decades-long career a CIA problem-solver, echo each other in various ways, and eventually, through those repetitions, another character emerges, Gil Egan, the actual author of these ersatz autobiographies. Son of a Marine-turned-CIA-agent, and in a metaphorical sense son of the atom bomb (because its deployment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki accelerated the war's end, thus saving his father), the fortysomething Egan uses these seven stories to paint a portrait of a morally mutable country whose identity shifts like that of an actor moving from sitcom role to sitcom role.

Egan also fixates on a girl from his past, Susan, whose teenage rejection of him and subsequent disappearance from his life allows him to turn her into his version of Jay Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan: a muse through which to express the beauty of his dreams; her half-invented abstraction is what makes her pure enough to worship. Which, as her name suggests (sUSAn), also makes her a symbol of America (and maybe, as other clues imply, the atom bomb as well).

At times, Carson's appetite for allusion can make Gilligan's Wake read like a crossword puzzle based on the cover photo of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And there's certainly no shortage of sitcom-style verbal slapshtick here. But Carson can toss off vivid and inventive one-liners just as easily as he can bad puns. In one instance, the Professor says Roy Cohn has "eyes that slid around their weak sockets like two smoldering oil drops in an enameled saucepan." In another, Ginger brags that she could turn "that statue of the Thinker into something you'd use for doughnut-tossing practice."

And ultimately, all that comic energy deepens into genuinely moving elegy. Somewhere over the course of the last half century, Carson suggests, America went adrift. And despite our awareness of our condition, we remain adrift. Why? In part because the past, so vivid and accessible through the endless array of media with which we furnish our present, sets the course for our future: history is a rerun from which we cannot awake.