Gilligan's Wake

by Tom Carson

A kaleidoscopic novel about our last American century

A skipper plies the waters of the South Pacific, running ammunition and passing the time with navy buddies McHale and Jack Kennedy, remembering the sweet caress of Screw-Me Susie. A New York millionaire reunites with his prep school classmate Alger Hiss, and journeys to an unusual downtown cafe to meet a bearded friend. A young woman and her confidante Daisy Buchanan sink into the languor of the Hamptons and Provincetown. A buxom redhead from Alabam-don’t-give-a-damn travels to Hollywood, in search of fame and fortune. A charismatic professor assists Robert Oppenheimer with his desert calculations and is henceforth the author of every American political conspiracy. And Mary-Ann Kilroy leaves Russell, Kansas, for Paris and love, only to discover that you can never go home (nor leave the island).

But beneath these stories is the story of their author, an institutionalized shadow man who has twisted the histories of six characters into a pastiche of American history.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Humor, Historical Fiction, American, Novels, Pop Culture

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2002

About the author

Tom Carson is the author of Gilligan’s Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of The Year for 2003. Currently GQ’s “The Critic,” he won two National Magazine Awards for criticism as Esquire magazine’s “Screen” columnist and has been nominated two more times since then. He also won the CRMA criticism award for his book reviews in Los Angeles magazine.

Before that, he wrote extensively about pop culture and politics for the LA Weekly and the Village Voice, including an obituary for Richard Nixon in the latter that the late Norman Mailer termed “brilliant.” He has contributed over the years to publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the Atlantic Monthly. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Clock. His verse and other random writings can be found at tomcarson.net.

In 1979, he was the youngest contributor — with an essay on the Ramones — to Greil Marcus’s celebrated rock anthology, Stranded. With Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon, he edited Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough: Essays In Honor of Robert Christgau in 2002.

Born in Germany in 1956, he grew up largely abroad at the hands of the U.S. State Department. He graduated in 1977 from Princeton University, where he won the Samuel Shellabarger award for creative writing. A former resident of Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles, he now lives in New Orleans with his wife, Arion Berger, and can be found all too often at Buffa’s Lounge on Saints’ days.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gilligan’s Wake is a hallucinatory trip through the mazes of the modern American history, bleak corridors of power and the gloomy literary labyrinths…

Across from a scary-looking mausoleum just short of Union Square, some burlies are hoisting a sign that makes me wonder if I’m on peyote. It’s a clock with twelve hands all holding coffee cups, and underneath it says, “There’s Always Time For Some More Maxwell House!” I mean, sometimes I think the straights know things we don’t, out in the crazy heart of America. The whole bit’s gone a little haywire, we aren’t moving, now I see that Ferlinghetti’s in a face-off with a couple of wharf rats up from the Embarcadero who think our gang is what’s wrong with this picture…

Tom Carson smartly echoes many books: Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, V. and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale by Herman Melville, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Public Burning by Robert Coover and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West – just to name a few.
And even if the narration is often overwrought and sometimes it even turns kitschy Tom Carson managed to recount an impressive tale…

“Well – but they were traitors, by Jove! Of course Alger and the Rosenbergs betrayed their country. That was their job – that’s what traitors do! If I could see that, I assumed anyone could. But these people,” I said, staring around my shelves, “call themselves the patriots – so what on earth is going on?”

And history keeps moving on without any care for all the historians…

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This is the book you've been looking for.
Read it today.
It's called "Gilligan."
It's called "Wake."
Do you really need more?
It'll be the best US$0.01+shipping you will ever be able to spend.

[MJ Nicholls]

First-rate wordplay and outstanding mindbendery in evidence, but narratively nothing particularly interesting past the p68 point. Strained pastiche, overly long surreal dream sequences, a Pynchonian tedium for neolonames-as-characters that disappear when the sentence ends, and an absence of any tangible through-plot bogs down one’s pleasure. Too much reliance on unfunny dialogue and bland satire also kissed this reader goodbye. Cover is one of the ugliest around too. But Carson can work words: no dispute. The curious might consult this soapbox gush.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite novels from the 2000s. It's a complex and imaginatively hallucinatory retelling of modern history through the prism of the seven castaways on "Gilligan's Island." That's right: Joyceian and Sherwood Schwartzian. Not at all hokey or gimmicky, but just so masterfully executed. I get it down every now and then and enjoy a chapter or two, admiringly.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, the tale of a fateful trip . . . there's Gilligan, the Skipper, too, the Millionaire and his Wife, the Movie Star . . . the Professor and Mary-Ann, here in Gilligan's Wake.”

I really enjoyed this book. Purchased several years ago after discovering it on Goodreads, it quickly took its place on a shelf and collected dust. I'd already moved on to something else. Wait for me it did, until I was ready, so chock it up as just another one of those “why did I wait so long to read this” books, of which there have been quite a few lately.

Rather than a tipsy tumble from a ladder à la Joycean hijinks, here a bit'o the old shock treatment [gimme, gimme] ZZT ZZT gets our 'little buddy' off on his fantastical, madcap history-bending daydream buzz-trip of America's Century, Gilligan's Wake, populated by figures real and imaginary, historical and hysterical, from JFK, Richard Nixon, Alger Hiss, Frank Sinatra, Robert Oppenheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frank Baum, to Holden Caufield, Dobie Gillis, Daisy Buchanan, and Quinton McHale. It's Gil again, and his Wake.

Or just the Minnow's wake?

Gilligan is this tale's Here Comes Everybody [HCE], recurring under countless guises – Maynard G. Krebs, Gliaglin, Lil Gagni, Mr. Gagilnil, Gaingill, Gil Egan – throughout the following six fables, history retellings – whatever they are – each narrated by one of the characters from the TV sitcom, taking the reader through America's 20th Century. Overlapping, interconnections, always with a Gilligan incarnation lingering about (after all, it is His dream) – the past transmogrified, krebsofied, twisted and run through the Cornogrifer . . .

It's wacky, it's low brow, it's high brow – you better know your American Century Pop Culture, the sitcoms of the sixties, The Flying Nun, McHale's Navy, The Odd Couple, F Troop, Doctor Kildare, Dobie Gillis – yes, they're all there. And did I say there wa­s plenty of low brow . . .

“In the basement, when I wasn't getting electroshocked, they'd put me on laundry detail. I didn't like it, because laundry was the cruelest chore – breeding clean clothes out of the dead wash, mixing Tide and Joy, and so on.”

“That was how I learned what it was like to be a bad girl – to be a mad girl, between blue thighs.”

“After all, he'd once considered buying a dog and naming it Robertson just so he could tell people to pat Robertson.”

“Sitting in for Madeleine Proust on The M.C. M Show tonight, I'm . . . ZZT ZZT, went an outbreak of static.”

“It was all Bowie and Lou fucking Reed from freshman to junior year. But I don't think anything ever really made him happy until the Ramones came along.”

And there's the Gatsby's, the bombmakers of Los Alamos, Jean-Luc Godard hanging with Mary-Ann – I could go on. Let's just say . . .

WE ARE ALL GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.

[Scott Hammack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I had to read this from the moment I heard what it was: a retelling of "Gilligan's Island" written from the point of view of each of the castaways, co-existing and interacting with many other fictional and historical characters of the time period. That kind of thing is right up my alley, so I had to check it out at least for the sheer weirdness factor. But as it turned out, there was a lot more to it than I expected.

When I call it a "retelling of 'Gilligan's Island,'" that's a little bit misleading, because very little of the book actually deals with the characters' time on the island. For the most part, it delves into each character's backstory prior to the three-hour tour -- one chapter per character, in order of the theme song, in first-person. As you might expect, the characterizations are a little bit different and deeper than you'd find on the show, often with bizarre twists, but still close enough to seem familiar. The castaways don't interact with each other much in their chapters (though each story somehow involves an anagram of "Gilligan"), which are more like seven separate stories than one continuous narrative, but they are all interconnected in one way or another.

For all of that, what I'm describing still basically sounds like Gilligan fanfic. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I can see how some people might not be that interested in reading it. But as you get further into it, things start to get more complicated than that. The first few stories are fairly straightforward, but somewhere around the middle it starts to incorporate some odd and sometimes confusing storytelling devices, and it all gets a bit "postmodern." (That may annoy some people, but for me this is where it really started to get interesting.) The final chapter takes it to new heights of weirdness, but in the end it all sort of comes together and sheds some new light on the nature of the story (not to imply that there's some kind of "he was dead all along!" twist, but for a lot of the book I was wondering if it was really going anywhere and if it would all add up to anything, and it turns out that it does (though it's still pretty weird)). You do eventually find out what happens with the island, and after all that madness the conclusion is actually rather poignant.

All right, look, I know this book isn't for everybody, and a lot of people would probably just find the whole concept ridiculous, but it's more than just a gimmick. Maybe I'm biased because it hits so close to my own interests, but I really liked it and would place it up there with my favorite books.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ambitious and very funny novel is not remotely a linear narrative. Rather, as its title suggests, it moves with the spirit of James Joyce and presents a series of seemingly jumbled narratives riffing lightly on characters from the TV series GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. In a style that has been compared with that of Thomas Pynchon, Tom Carson's book is not a particularly easy read, but neither is it especially difficult. It does require, and it plays like a jazz band on, an awareness of popular culture and of politics in the post-war era. Carson's sense of humor and of wordplay is spectacular and while the novel really only uses GILLIGAN'S ISLAND as a springboard and touchstone, you will never look at that TV series in quite the same way after reading this. Darkly funny, intricate, and at times puzzling, GILLIGAN'S WAKE is a terrific novel--but, like the show that inspired it, it's not for everyone.

[[Name Redacted]]

WHY DID NO-ONE TELL ME THAT THIS NOVEL EXISTED?!? It's a parody of Joyce's novel AND a send-up of American television!

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really interesting book. To be honest, it's not something I would have picked up or stayed with if it hadn't been recommended to me by Scott, b/c I really hated the first chapter: it's very self-consciously clever, and it bombards you with puns and pop culture references and literary allusions and crazy-person talk, which made me really exasperated. It was like everything I hate about James Joyce and writers who want to be him.

But it's a short first chapter, and the second chapter hooked me pretty quickly. There are a few more annoying "look at me!" Pun Moments, but for the most part, it was pretty fascinating. Also, there are lots of times when Carson uses his language skills for good, not evil: at so many points in the book, he tossed off these really fresh, apt descriptions -- y'know, the kind that are perfect and you wish you'd thought of yourself.

I've never even seen Gilligan's Island (I know! Really!) so there are probably references I missed, but the book isn't really about that. I liked it for the characters, who were interesting and distinct -- each chapter is narrated by one of the castaways, and Carson does a good job creating their voices. He also writes really great satire, and this is a funny-but-harsh look at America in the twentieth century. He also does pomo pretty well, too: the chapters, although separate, are all connected in interesting ways, and the characters interact both with historical figures and other well-known fictional characters. I'm not always great at making the leap from Realistic to Suspending Disbelief, but the way Carson makes his characters metaphors AND psychologically complicated individuals worked for me, and, once I got past the first chapter, everything kind of flowed and I found myself really enjoying all the little connections between chapters without wondering too much about What It All Means.

To sum up: smart, funny, poignant, deft, and a little bit masturbatory -- but those parts are worth getting through for the book as a whole.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sit right back and you'll hear a tale...of a campy send-up of James Joyce's "Finnigan's Wake". More than a three-hour tour, this is a tour-de-force through American history (sort of) and an entangled story of what the Gilligan's Island characters might have been up to before they started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship.

[Cat. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hello James Joyce-influence! There is something to be said for being the same age as the author of something like this book, because, even if you don't get the plot completely nailed down, you at least understand the allusions and puns. For example, from the first section:

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.... When dawn wells up in the sky, she knots me together. Then we'd sit around in the Cleaver Ward in our robes and gowns.... The one across from us was called the Burt Ward, and every schizo in it wore a mask and hopped around like batty robins.

OK? Count the pop-culture references: I find at least 9, with a couple others buzzing around the perimeter that I can't place. But do you see what I mean about the plot? To be fair, this is the least intelligible chapter, kind of like someone who has done nothing but watch TV his entire life would sound like if you took him out of his living room.

The bones of this book are the seven characters on Gilligan's Island, appearing in the same order as the song: Gilligan, the Skipper, the Millioinaire, his wife, the movie star, the professor, Mary Ann. Kind of deflating:

- Gilligan's nuts, as is obvious from the quote above
- the Skipper is living in the past (World War II to be exact, where he meets JFK)
- the Millionaire is entirely clueless (recommended Alger Hiss for a government job even though he knew Hiss was a Communist...)
- his wife was a morphine addict in the 20s who married Thurston as a backstop when her father died
- the Movie Star is from "Alabam'-goddamn" and is actually a B- and X-rated movie star whose biggest claim to fame is sleeping with Sammy Davis, Jr., in Sinatra's house in Palm Springs while her sister did JFK in the pool
- the Professor...one of the characters I liked best on the show--is a narcissistic sex-addict who worked on the Manhattan Project and other creepily nefarious underground government programs
- Mary Ann is a perpetual virgin who left home for a year of college in France where she lost her virginity...the first time...and can't get back to her Kansas home because it's Brigadoon, so she just keeps wandering the globe losing her virginity time after time

Confused yet? This is definitely a book to read again, more closely, if I had time. I'd skip the Movie Star and Professor chapters because they were terminally depressing. Intricate book, good for book clubs, if you have a group that's pretty avant.

[Patrick DiJusto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not so much a novel, as a collection of short character studies of six people, as told by the seventh.

The first character is a middle aged sailor. A veteran of WWII, where he commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific with a rich kid from Boston named Jack and a schemer named McHale, he eventually starts his own business running three hour carter cruises in Hawaii.

The second character is an upper class American twit, incredibly rich, and a good friend of Tom Buchanan and Alger Hiss.

The third character is a spoiled rich girl; friend, opiate enabler, and occasional lover to Daisy Buchanan. She eventually marries the second character.

The fourth character is a pneumatic redhead from Alabama who goes to Hollywood to break into the movies. The only advice her mother gives her is "Don't sleep with no coons". She winds up meeting (and getting passed around) the Rat Pack, where she does indeed hook up with Sammy Davis Jr. Hijinks ensue.

The fifth character is a priapic omnisexual polymath genius, invited by a catamited Roy Cohn to become the scientific advisor to the Trilateral/Bilderberg/Illuminati cabal who really run the world. As part of a grand psychosocial experiment, he has himself marooned on a deserted island with a cross section of "average" Americans.

The sixth character is a farm girl from a small town in Kansas, which, Brigadoon-like, only appears once every hundred years. Oh, and every time she loses her virginity it grows back overnight.

There are strong hints that the narrator of these stories is a seventh person, possibly insane, who knows all six people very well.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is a mash-up history of the 20th century, loaded with pop-culture references as well as those political and not-so-pop, all wrapped up in the neurosis of a young man.

each chapter re-tells the story of one of the castaways from gilligan's island, each time within the context of an era and filled with forrest-gumpian entanglements. the skipper runs a pt boat alongside mchale and jack kennedy. lovey has a drug-fueled flapper friendship (and more) with daisy buchanan, thurston recommends alger hiss for his very first government job, and ginger is best friends with and co-model to bettie page as well as lives in the same building as (and lends a pink angora sweater to) ed wood.

while none of the book reaches the feverish, delirious pace and delightfully loaded language of the first chapter (gilligan as maynard g. krebs in the mayo institute's psych ward with holden caulfield), it does a good job of encapsulating the feel of a country growing up (for better or for worse) alongside its confused youth and doesn't end up being half as goofy as the premise might make it sound.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m taking credit for finishing this book, even though I only made it through the chapter in which Ginger and her twin sister had a foursome with Jack Kennedy and Sammy Davis Junior. I did make it all the way through Lovee Howell’s morphine addiction and bisexuality (Daisy, of Gatsby / Thurston, of the Isle), Gilligan’s psychosis, Thurston’s struggles with money but a lack of intellectual profundity, and the Skipper’s alcoholism and predilections. I was poised to read all about the Professor’s sociopathic bisexuality but, really, what’s the point? I could no longer be shocked or amused, and parallels to Finnegan’s Wake and JJ’s style, however clever and well done, couldn’t pull me through. Not since the Rabbit series have I been so utterly bored with dirty stories.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

From what I recall, this was quite a head trip. Carson takes the characters from Gilligan's Island and plugs them in as general representations of the American post-war psyche. Gilligan exploring the sub-culture...the booze and morphine addled Howells losing their grip and seeing their world become less relevant...star struck Ginger looking for her 15 minutes of fame...Mary Ann attempting to lose her innocence...the Skipper recalling his glory days and the Professor-as-Smoking-Man on the X-Files.

Who knew this could work as a story? But the combination of the hopelessly banal and shallow Gilligan characters awash in sleaze, sex, power plays and amoral actions is good twisted fun.

[Jenni Wieland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had my head spinning. I didn't know what to expect, and the premise seems sort of cheesy, but I consider it a good find. The narration takes us into the heads, hearts and incredibly sordid pasts of the 7 castaways of Gilligan's Island, and with it, into the head, heart and sordid history of 20th Century America.
No, it doesn't tell us how they all ended up on the island-- it tells us how they ended up at some of the most significant, often top secret, events in our recent history... and it is not what you'd expect.

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing. I gave it 5 stars, and would have given it 6 if I could. To properly enjoy it, you must enjoy postmodernism and be amused by wordplay. If you meet those requirements, you're in for the trip of a lifetime. The story takes the main characters of Gilligan's Island - in the order from the theme song - and provides them with back stories of their own, rife with cameos from prominent 20th century figures, real and imaginary alike. Tough it out through the first, short chapter. The rest of the book is worth the confusion of the first few pages.

[erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A witty, imaginative, salacious and oftentimes hysterical re-telling of American History and pop culture vis-a-vis seven vastly different and intriguing characters whose lives all collide at different points in time. Gilligan's Wake is an indulgence to be savored. In a word, this book is fun through and through.

[Jeffrey Cavanaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sometimes funny, sometimes surreal mishmash of 20th-century America as told through the backstory of TV's original Lost castaways. If you combine one part crappy sitcom with one part Canterbury Tales with many parts pot then Gilligan's Wake would be the result.

[R.d. Mumma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was just reminded of this novel by a friend who posted that today (9/26/2014) is the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast episode of 'Gilligan's Island,' so I dug into Amazon where I see that my 1/31/2003 review of 'Gilligan's Wake' - probably the first Amazon review I wrote - was featured. Here it is:

(Five Stars) Joycean ride for nondubliners

I just finished this guilty pleasure on the train to work this morning. I read and enjoy a lot of books, but I never feel the need to comment immediately to the Amazonian public about them. This is one that I'd hate to see slip quietly below the radar in the flood of new novels.
It's not just a pop culture pastiche I've seen it described as; it's a very heartfelt picture of the world for those of us who grew up in the second half of the American century. If you've ever read Ulysses wishing that you had more firsthand experience with the streets of 1904 Dublin, or tried to read Finnegans Wake wishing that you had a better working knowledge of Norwegian puns, this is the book for you (assuming of course, you owned a TV, were aware of current events and maybe read some T.S. Eliot and had a few years of French).
Here's proof once again that St. James of Dublin (Trieste, Paris and Zurich) was not a dead end for literature, but a new beginning.

Now I want to read it again.

[Daniel Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I no longer remember what I expected this book to be when I began reading it. I stumbled across it online and thought the concept ("an exploration of the 20th century from the perspective of each character on Gilligan's Island") sounded interesting, and I suppose that description is about as adequate as can be expected from just a few words, but there is so much more going on here.

This book is DEFINITELY not for everyone... I love mind-screwy postmodern novels like this, as well as pop culture and recent American history, and even with a fairly adequate (though certainly not encyclopedic) knowledge of the cultural and historical background, I was still not able to follow everything that was going on without a fair bit of research and external reading. But (for me), it was ABSOLUTELY worth it, because this book simply *works* for me. There are multiple levels of metafictional tomfoolery going on here, great wordplay and writing, powerful imagery, and a great, great ending that somehow lands the plane in an elegant and restrained way. This is a demanding book, but for a certain audience it is also a must-read.

[Jean-Pierre Vidrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genre-defying. Mind-bending. Modifiers are not adequate to describe the experience of reading this book. This is so much more than an offbeat tale making unlikely use of characters from an old sitcom. This is an indictment of America's crimes against the world and itself. It's a bitter pill to swallow, and it being delivered through these characters does nothing to sugarcoat it.
Even the above statement is not enough to praise this novel. The final chapter and the author's afterword (I almost typed "aftermath") puts things into perspective. It isn't all a nightmare hiding beneath a comical fantasy. Like the TV show it draws from, the book does not remain merely black and white.

[Alaina Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess the last thing I can say about Gilligan’s Wake is that, underneath all the trappings of putting beloved characters into historical situations [...], the book acts as a goodbye to the twentieth century and a call-to-arms on making sure the twenty-first continues to move us forward into brighter and greener pastures.

For the full review (and reassurance that it's not all about Gilligan's Island as you may think), follow the link to That's What She Read.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Combining the need for more backstory on those who were lost on four hour tour with a historical/hysterical context that was enlightening and humorous. Especially the Professor who's response to everyone is to attempt to have sex or Mrs. Howell and her take on the Suffragettes.

[John Treat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely hilarious, the product of a wonderfully twisted intellect. Some of the chapters go on too long, but Lovey Howell's saga is worth it all. Don't expect anyone born after 1960 to get any of it, though.

[Jake McCrary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a huge exercise in recognizing culture references. I probably failed at many of them.

I actually had to search online to recognize some of the references. The book is interestingly structured and definitely asks a lot of the reader.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It had me at "Hello"

Or that chapter about Professor X's adventures thru the 20th century. One or the other.

[Eliana]

I am liking this book but it takes too much concentration, ala CATCH 22 to get it. so it will have to wait till a larger brain phase of my life.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pop culture references + creative, fun approach to writing = good book!