Seven Castaways In Search of an Author

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale of a young mental patient reimagining the 20th century

By Liza Featherstone
Liza Featherstone is the author of "Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement."

January 5, 2003

'The best I would claim for this book," says Tom Carson about his new novel, "Gilligan's Wake" (Picador, $25), "at times, if I were unusually cocky about it, is 'kindergarten Nabokov.'" He immediately seems embarrassed about having made this remark, as if he hadn't packed in quite enough disclaimers. "Compared to the most minor Nabokov novel, my book is piffle!"

We're talking at the Washington Square Hotel about Carson's dark, hilarious and inventively weird novel, which is told from the point of view of the seven "Gilligan's Island" protagonists, whose lives intersect with such 20th century American cultural icons as Alger Hiss, Bob Dole, the H-bomb and "The Great Gatsby's" Daisy Buchanan (genteel as ever, if also a smack-shooting single mom and a lesbian). All are dreamed into being by a delusional shadow narrator, a young mental patient who thinks he's Maynard Krebs, a character on '60s sitcom "Dobie Gillis," who was also played by "Gilligan" star Bob Denver.

Nabokov's influence on "Gilligan's Wake" is evident. Like the Russian emigre, Carson is a fascinated outsider to American popular culture. His father was in the U.S. foreign service, and the family lived abroad (first in West Africa and then in West Berlin) until Carson was 12. "In Africa there was no TV at all," he recalls. "I don't think there were even telephones. And in Berlin, the only TV [I remember] were these terrible East German spy movies where Americans were the villains, which was kind of entertaining."

Returning to the United States in 1968, Carson quickly made up for lost time. "If [American pop culture] hasn't been part of your everyday experience, your family gets shipped back to the States, and all of a sudden you're plunged into it - it just makes you a keener student of what's going on. You're trying to catch up with all your new schoolmates. They've known all this since the day of their birth, and you're frantic and just scrambling. 'Leave It to Beaver' - should I know about that?"

Carson, who now writes a column for Esquire on TV and film, has been having a love affair with American pop culture ever since, one that's evident in the new novel. His journalism career began as a rock critic for The Village Voice in 1977, "a great year to be a rock critic. That was when punk was just exploding. That was what I was interested in, that was what I wanted to write about. For someone like me, punk made perfect sense." Punk, he explains, affects "a sort of cartoon distance, and that turns out to be a way of expressing intensity... it turns out the things you care about the most are also things that you can't help feeling alienated from. So you express them in grotesque double-edged ways. And for someone who had that kind of betwixt and between relationship to American culture anyhow - the first time I heard the Ramones, I thought, 'Well, this makes perfect sense!'"

Carson's first novel, "Twisted Kicks," was published in 1981 by Entwhistle Books. That small press is no longer in business, but the individual who published the book is still hawking it on Amazon.com, where one customer reviewer calls it "no less than the greatest novel of our (or anyone's) time," while another tends to take Carson's own, much dimmer view. "I'm trying to get him to stop - I don't want the book out there," Carson says. "It's a very immature, overwrought kind of book about teenage alienation in the suburbs. [Novelist] Madison Smartt Bell... was kind enough to say that it was 'Less Than Zero' ahead of 'Less Than Zero.' And I'm not sure how big a recommendation that really is." He laughs. "It's a book written without any perspective that takes itself terribly seriously. All this anguish! Because as far as I was concerned, if people weren't anguished" - here a self-mocking, melodramatic pause - "they weren't living."

Asked about the evolution of "Gilligan's Wake," Carson explains: "I had spent years trying to work on a long, complicated, serious novel that was about growing up abroad during the Cold War.... I couldn't make it work worth a damn. Because I found out that I wasn't that interested in just relaying my experiences. I kept wanting to veer off into grotesque fantasies and goofy extrapolations, but I couldn't find a structure that would justify doing all that. And then "Gilligan's Wake" popped into my head. I mean, literally the title popped into my head... and then I had a concept that would let me unleash that whole vein of fantasy and absurdity."

Asked about the challenge of breathing life into such stereotypical, familiar characters, he at first disavows any anxieties: "I wasn't smart enough to hesitate," he said with a laugh. Later he admits: "I liked the nerviness of it. It felt like a bit of a dare. And I think that sort of got me going."