(FORTUNE Magazine) – It sounds like something you'd debate with your dorm buddies, scarfing down Cheetos: Is Gilligan's Island an apt metaphor for 20th-century America? In Gilligan's Wake (Picador), sure to be the season's most talked-about novel, Tom Carson takes that most surreal of TV series and makes it more surreal by treating the characters as if they were real--sort of. (Mrs. Howell is a heroin-addicted cohort of Daisy Buchanan's; the Professor is a Manhattan Project scientist who works for a cabal that controls the world; Ginger ends up at Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs pad, falling heels over head for Sammy Davis Jr.) Then Carson spins the whole thing in the blender of postmodernism. Does it work? With a premise this high-concept, it doesn't really have to. There's at least one narrative layer too many, but the sheer bravado of the writing carries it off. Gilligan's Wake is overambitious, overwrought, and occasionally overbearing--as well as a heck of a lot of fun. --Erik Torkells