Wednesday, July 27, 2011

ALL THAT SEVEN ALLOWS

The recent death of Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan’s Island, reminded me of one of the more peculiar books I’ve read in the last decade: Tom Carson’s 2003 Gilligan’s Wake (Picador) a crazy-quilt send-up of Joyce, Kerouac & Salinger which views the 20th Century, with various levels of jaundice, through the eyes of Schwartz’s Seven Stranded Castaways.



Each of the novel’s seven chapters is a monologue by one of the characters: The Skipper recounts his experiences in command of a PT Boat in WWII South Pacific, where he hangs out with McHale, Jack Kennedy & Richard Nixon. Millionaire Thurston Howell gets Alger Hiss his job with the Department of Agriculture. Howell’s wife “Lovey” recalls her decadent early days, sharing morphine addiction with a post-Gatsby Daisy Buchanan. Ginger leaves Alabama to make it big in Hollywood, falls in with the Rat Pack, &, after meeting Sammy Davis, Jr., reneges on her promise to her mother never to have an interracial romance.

The Professor, a veteran of Los Alamos, goes on to be a crony of Roy Cohn & to play a part in just about every piece of covert American nastiness of the postwar period. Meanwhile, wholesome Kansan Mary Anne lands in Paris & winds up in an affair with Jean-Luc Godard, yet somehow finds herself, despite repeated attempts to the contrary, mysteriously & miraculously a perpetual virgin.

As for Gilligan himself, his opening monologue places him first in the identity of Bob Denver’s earlier iconic TV character, Maynard G. Krebs of Dobie Gillis, here a San Francisco Beat-scene poet, protesting the Bay of Pigs with Ferlinghetti, before waking up to find himself sharing a mental ward with Holden Caulfield, Ira Hayes & Edsel Ford. He’s electroshocked into Gilligan-esque infantilism, & there are passages in the subsequent chapters indicating that the exploits of the other castaways are the products of this hapless 20th-Century Everyman’s fried brain.

The book—available on Kindle, by the way—is a stunt, of course, & too clever by half. But there are long stretches of remarkable, even powerful writing in every chapter, each of which has its own idiomatic style. & Mason, in common with millions of Boomer-era kids, understands something that TV snobs could never quite grasp: that for all the undisputed broadness of the acting & plain imbecility of the writing, there’s still something mythic & archetypical about Gilligan’s Island that can’t be dismissed from the imagination.

2 comments:

  1. Gilligan's Island is one of they top 5 (if not higher) most iconic icons (sorry) of the 20th century!

    When assigned a theme paper in 4th grade with the subject what I want to be when I grow up, I penned and illustrated a four page opus on how my greatest ambition was to be a cast away. jw

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  2. I didn't know that "castaway" was a viable career goal, or I'd've been right there with you...

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