Gilligan's Wake

"Gilligan's Wake" (ISBN 0-312-29123-X) is a 2003 retelling of the story of the 1960s CBS sitcom "Gilligan's Island" from the viewpoints of the seven major characters, written by "Esquire" film and television critic Tom Carson. The title is derived from the title of the TV show and "Finnegans Wake", the seminal work of Irish novelist James Joyce. The book was critically acclaimed, drawing comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. Its nature as a "secret history" featuring numerous fictional characters is also similar to the Wold Newton Universe. The novel subsequently appeared in paperback in 2004 (ISBN 0-312-31114-1).

Plot summary

In Carson's novel, each of the seven principal characters narrate their version of events, in order of their mention in the show's title theme. It becomes apparent that each of them brings a different, often contradictory, reality to the events they shared. All of them have someone or something important in their lives which is an anagram of "Gilligan", however.

Characters in "Gilligan's Wake"

* Gilligan claims not to be Gilligan at all. He is rather, or at least believes himself to be, Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik character portrayed by actor Bob Denver, who also portrayed Gilligan, in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", although there is also some evidence that he may in reality be Gil Egan, son of a Minnesota mechanic, or perhaps a Central Intelligence Agency operative. "Gilligan's" chapter, the first and shortest, is probably the most similar to the writing style of Pynchon as displayed in "V." and "Gravity's Rainbow", with an almost-endless series of puns and popular culture allusions. "Gilligan's" reminiscences are suspect, however, as the character admits to undergoing treatment at the Mayo Clinic, among other places, for mental illness.

* The Skipper turns out to have been a World War II PT boat skipper, whose colleagues included both John F. Kennedy, then skipper of PT "109", and Quentin McHale, fictional skipper of PT "73" in the television series "McHale's Navy". McHale is mentioned as being in a rivalry with Sergeant Bilko. Skipper later served on the submarine that rescued the downed George H. W. Bush.

* We learn that Thurston Howell, III was a longtime acquaintance of Alger Hiss', who once recruited him to help start a cell of the Communist Party USA in the guise of a chapter of the Explorers Club. Howell was also a collector of special comic books which were in fact United States Government propaganda and were distributed clandestinely only to persons who were, or who were connected to, powerful decision-makers.

* Howell's wife "Lovey" was a society girl who was not particularly enamored of her husband, and in fact had married him only after having shared a morphine addiction, and subsequently a lesbian relationship with Daisy Buchanan, a character in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel "The Great Gatsby".

* Ginger Grant was a Southern girl from a promiscuous, redneck family who had begun her Hollywood career by posing for bondage photos for $5 apiece. She later overcame her upbringing by bedding Sammy Davis, Jr. at Frank Sinatra's house in Palm Desert. She took the part on the show to further her acting career.

* The Professor was not ever really "Roy Hinkley" at all, but rather "Professor X", the youngest member of Robert Oppenheimer's atomic bomb team during World War II. He was part of a secret government cabal working behind the scenes from a clandestine base underneath Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River, and the castaways were stranded there as part of an experiment conducted by him. He was secretly responsible for all efforts to rescue them being thwarted, and unknown to them was capable of coming and going freely as he pleased. In fact, he lost interest in the project after three years (thus "accounting" for the show's cancellation). He was also a bisexual predator who had a relationship with Joseph McCarthy's legal counsel Roy Cohn, among others.

* Mary Ann was in fact a girl from Kansas. She had lost her father in World War II and was raised by her mother on the outskirts of Russell, Kansas, which in the book is a Brigadoon-like place materializing only very rarely to outsiders. She and her mother are great admirers of the city attorney, disabled World War II veteran Bob Dole. Mary Ann (in the book called Mary Ann Kilroy after the ubiquitous World War II image, "Kilroy was here" rather than Mary Ann Summers as in the television series) had studied at the Sorbonne as a young woman, and had learned in Paris during this time that she was physically incapable of losing her virginity; apparently her hymen grew back almost immediately after any and all sexual encounters. Mary Ann's story is the longest and most detailed related in the book. In fact, she had seen one of Ginger's earlier pictures while on a date with her French boyfriend, a film student.

Literary significance and criticism

Although the book requires a somewhat vast knowledge of popular culture, and to some extent, "higher" literature to be comprehensible to its readers, some of Carson's fellow critics (particularly those who were also novelists themselves) admired the work; critics are naturally likely to be possessed of the requisite knowledge to follow the book more so than more "average" readers.

* Novelist Madison Smartt Bell found the work to be worthy of the title's allusion to Joyce. Fact|date=February 2007

* Critic Martin Zimmerman of the "San Diego Union Tribune" found many echoes of Pynchon and other contemporary authors. Fact|date=February 2007

* "Publishers Weekly" gave the novel a coveted starred (favorable) review Fact|date=February 2007

* Critic Jason Anderson of the "Globe & Mail" compared it to Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" as well as "V." Fact|date=February 2007

* "Gilligan's Island" creator Sherwood Schwartz was quoted in "TV Guide" as saying, "This young man can write." Fact|date=February 2007

Footnotes

References

*cite book | title=Gilligan's Wake | last=Carson | first=Tom | authorlink=Tom Carson | publisher=Picador | location=USA | edition=1st (hardback) | month=January | year=2003 | id=ISBN 0-312-29123-X