Gilligan's Wake: A Novel
Read Gilligan's Wake: A Novel Online
Authors: Tom Carson
Additional Acclaim for
Gilligan’s Wake
“There can’t be many books with energy, depth, and sheer verbal agility enough to set James Joyce spinning in his grave, but here is one, a tour de force of a novel which expresses the American century from World War II on, both as an hilarious and biting satire and as a dark, delirious, psychedelic dream. ‘Genius’ is not a word to sling around carelessly, but Tom Carson must have had one sitting near him when he wrote
Gilligan’s Wake
”
—Madison Smartt Bell, author of
Master of the Crossroads
“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale that will snap your synapses like Jiffy Pop on a bonfire….
[Gilligan’s Wake]
is a wacked-out ride through history and pop culture.”
—Phil Kloer,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Dazzling and witty … Wild inventiveness and terrific wordplay, reminiscent sometimes of S.J. Perelman, sometimes of Peter De Vries. By making language the star, Carson transforms his boob-tube conceit into a captivating romp through our popular culture and Cold War history.”
—Roger K. Miller,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Carson’s prose often has the energy of a song by his beloved Ramones…. A loopy, exuberant novel-type prose event.”
—David Kelly,
The New York Times Book Review
“A heck of a lot of fun.”
—
Fortune
“If there were an America’s Cup Final for fevered, often brilliant writing, he’d be in it, and probably disqualified for ramming David Foster Wallace’s dinghy, for scuttling Thomas Pynchon s trimaran, for pooping on Robert Coover’s poop deck…. It’s not all jokes, wordplay, and mad flights, though. Carson has given his characters full lives; more accurately, full inner lives.”
—Martin Zimmerman,
San Diego Union-Tribune
“Carson,
Esquire
magazine’s TV critic, is to television what Pauline Kael was to film: a consistently intelligent voice brought to bear on a
medium in sore need of astute criticism. Logically enough, his first novel has an audacious TV-based premise; in seven separate stories, characters describe their experiences—as scientist, naval officer, actress, student, beatnik, and rich husband and wife—in postwar America. The twist is that there’s something oddly familiar about these seven.”
—Publishers Weekly
(starred)
“The title … barely hints at the conceptual audacity of this seriously comic debut novel. Carson here combines outsized literary ambitions with a voracious appetite for cross-cultural references, concocting a Pynchon-meets-sitcom parable of the American Dream.”
—Book Magazine
“What other book could court comparison with
Gravity’s Rainbow
and
Finnegans Wake
and still survive? And how, by the way, does it survive? By force of imaginative invention, verbal excitement, and delirious wit.
Gilligan’s Wake,
offering a brilliant, tragic reading of twentieth-century American history, is as ambitious and provocative a novel as I’ve read in a long, long time.”
—David Shields, author of
Enough About You
and
Remote
“This novel bends seventy-five years or so of political and television history into a enormous Technicolor pastiche, as thick with satire as it is with pop-culture references…. Carson’s style suggests David Foster Wallace after watching seventy-two hours of nonstop sitcom reruns; his verbal antics make for an intellectually stimulating read.”
—Booklist
“Dark, hilarious, and inventively weird.”
—Liza Featherstone,
Newsday
“[Carson’s] onto something hilarious and a little bit frightening with his
Wake.”
—Dan Deluca,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Not so much a nostalgic journey on the high seas of TV as a Viking berserker raid on the last American century … At its best, Carson’s brand of ail-American madness has the bravado and ingenuity of [Pynchon’s]
The Crying of Lot 49
and
V.”
—-Jason Anderson,
Toronto Globe & Mail
”A great jazz riff on twentieth-century popular culture … as goofy as the premise may seem,
Gilligan’s Wake
is a pretty brilliant eulogy.”
—Kathy Kerr,
Edmonton Journal
“There is, in the parlance of literary criticism, a shitload of stuff in this crazy, inventive book….
Gilligan’s Wake
gives us the twentieth century as a fever dream raging in the skull of a hidden narrator, the mad, history-obsessed Gil Egan, … pages of wordplay and mind games, illusions and allusions, high comedy and low humor, and enough references to choke Mr Ed.
—Scott Dickensheets,
Las Vegas Weekly
“Wildly original and thoroughly enjoyable.”
—Nancy Pearl, NPR/KUOW Seattle
“This young man is a brilliant writer.”
—Sherwood Schwartz, creator of
Gilligan’s Island
, in
TV Guide
“Only a novelist of Tom Carson’s sweeping intelligence and punk but not pitiless iconoclasm could have written this epic; audacious and original, subversive and often very funny, and spectacularly played out in the interzone between American glory and madness.”
—Steve Erickson, author of
The Sea Came in at Midnight
Gilligan’s Wake
Tom Carson
Picador New York
For my mother and Arion
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GILLIGAN’S WAKE
. Copyright © 2003 by Tom Carson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010.
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carson, Tom.
Gilligan’s wake : a novel / Tom Carson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-29123-X (he)
ISBN 0-312-31114-1 (pbk)
1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.A775 G45 2002
813'.54—dc21
2002029256
First Picador Paperback Edition: February 2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
III. Alger and Dean and My Son and I and Whatnot
SKIPPERTOO AND GET ME HOME, I MEAN IF YOU REALLY WANT TO hear about it. They took away my facial hair and gave me a small hat. Please to ignore dead bird around neck, hokay? We were seven, like the Mercury astronauts. But all that came after I’d done my time in the booby hatch.
Eisenhower on the rebop, waving yo-ho to a U-2 and a boo-hoo to Batista. So hipped am I on clinching my Houdini exit from the old burg, where the specimen before you wore a sweatshirt laundered only by my tears, that I don’t even feed the mailbox a snack for my best high-school buddy after Dobie skywrites me an epistle exhaling how gassed he is the New Frontier is here. When the thousand days start clicking off, I’m hanging on by my goatee in North Beach. The coffeehouses are losing steam, the topless bars aren’t so much as a gleam in Carol Doda’s plastic surgeon’s scalpel. On the sidewalk outside City Lights, with avid periwinkle peepers but a poor Christmas salting his ever waggable chin, even Ferlinghetti’s looking like he doesn’t know where his next trochee’s coming from. Hello, hi, “Can you believe this
fog?”
he says, clutching my arm, which what with Fisherman’s Wharf north by northwest and the Rice-A-Roni streetcar going dingding practically in our ears makes me think, wow, he’s never had a dull moment.
Then he put on some lip about the big “Ask not” recital that got beamed our way this San Fran
A.M
. out of snowy—doubly snowy, in the transmission-flaked ghost dance our coast’s early risers blinked at—Washington, DeeCee. “And so the Harvard sonovabitch asks Robert
Frost
to write him an inaugural poem, for Christ and Buddha’s sake,” Larry sniffed, huffing himself up to his full height just as some middle-aged square doing a walk-by in a mackintosh gave us a look like he hadn’t known our kind was still roosting in the nabe. “Pass
that
torch, Jack! They’ll never learn. That monosyllabic, meter-crazy Vermont retard—he ever stops by my woods with miles to go before he croaks, I’ll take two forks and stab him in the ass with them! Why wasn’t it Bill Carlos Bills? Hell, what about me? I’d have been there like a shot off a shovel.” We know you would, Ferl, I said, and made to split. Larry always
reminded me of a St. Bernard who’d gotten bombed on his own brandy cask. A dog on a long MacLeish, Corso used to say.
But me, I’m toking on a modest hope that things are looking up. Even if Rexroth did call it
déjà lu
, in a slam that accused me of counterfeiting bongos and beret to pull a fast one on easy readers““If I’m any judge,” which he was in all but robe and gavel, “this kid knows North Beach like the back of Allen Ginsberg’s hand"—my little book
Wake Me When It’s Over Daddy-O: Proems 1957—i960
has sold a couple of copies, and my girl, who got hers for free, looks good in a leotard. And even better out of one, even if I can’t quit missing Thalia Menninger, who never knew what she meant to me. For our bread, Suze is girl-ing the java urn at a place called the Vertigo-Go. Then, just three months into Camelot, JFK banana-peels us with the Bay of Pigs.
Bam, ogle me on the move with a few other scraggly cats and chicks down Columbus Avenue to Montgomery Street and Union Square, lipping “Hands off Castro!” and shoving our “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets at a sluice of snap-brims all doing the lunch-hour hurry-hurry. Ferlinghetti’s rounded up whoever isn’t on a reading tour or in Tangiers with Burroughs to show some angry beard. Soon a red light holds us up and we accordion, which is when the tagalonging crewcut we were hoping was plainclothes says he’s with the
Chronicle.
That’s all Ferl needs:
“When governments write bad poetry, poets have to govern. And
this
,” he says, puffing himself up to his full heat, “is a
bad poem
, in my professional opinion. You remember what Shelley said,” and if you’re fast you see the crewcut’s brain go “
Winters?”
but Larry is tearing along: “I mean I don’t know where Allen and Gregory are on this, we each go our own way, but to me the ‘free’ in free verse has always been a
verb
, you see. The way Fidel did Havana, I want to free verse. Free
verse
!” he hollers, jerking his head up at the rest of us. “
Free
verse!” And my Suze, who’s in black from her Feiffer-feet to the witch hat on her middle-parted hair and looks like she’s just guessed where all the flowers went, is nudging in and saying, “Larry, it’s turned green, like really green, green like my eyes, we gotta go.”
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, and that’s why they’ve just knocked FaFaFaFair Playayayay ffor CubaCubaCuba in a long scoop down the gutter. The fat one with the hair like shaving cream is tearing off his cap and lipping away at Larry like a one-man what’s-up-doc cartoon, and the shrimp in the sneaks and red sweater next to him has hard and frightened eyes for me, why me? I know I don’t know him from Adam.
Then someone hollers “Watch yourself, Maynard!,” in the same brain-blink that my inner radar pings a toppling world of uh-oh up above. When I look the coffee clock’s come loose, did it jump or was it pushed?, and is avalanching toward me from the sky. I try to protect myself with my “Leave Fidel Alone!” sign, but it’s too late, because
time has grown a thousand feathers that I have to try to name. The clouds keel like old sails in a washing machine,
hey pops which way to Alcatraz?, and Suze’s face is skidding at me from all directions under her witch’s hat, her mouth making the big O, as Larry jumps back like a circus lion in a movie running backwards and I think Corso never liked me. Off in a corner of this scene, which I couldn’t sort out with a colander, a lanky detective was hauling a drenched blonde out of the big blue drink next to the Golden Gate.