''Finnegans Wake,'' the unreadable James Joyce novel, is a logorrheic logjam of high modernist name-checking and smug trilingual puns. ''Gilligan's Island,'' the classic Sherwood Schwartz TV show, is among the most delightful bits of sitcom fluff ever to soothe the brain. Gilligan's Wake, a novel by noted TV critic Tom Carson, introduces the two to zany effect. It is an energetic pastiche that never meta fiction it didn't like to riff on.
There are seven stories on the desert isle, and Carson fantasizes consciousnesses and pop-cult contexts for characters resembling each of the castaways. In one of countless tributes to ''The Great Gatsby,'' it seems Mrs. Howell palled around with Daisy Buchanan in the Jazz Age. A movie star swinging Ginger's ''sequined caboose'' once worked in glamour modeling with the pinup queen Bettie Page, who here dissects Nathanael West's Hollywood novel ''The Day of the Locust.'' The Skipper's Navy was both McHale's and John F. Kennedy's. And his li'l buddy? A beatnik poet who fits the description of ''Gilligan'' star Bob Denver (and who answers to Maynard G. Krebs, the character Denver played on ''The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis'') gets packed off to the Mayo Clinic, where Holden Caulfield is a bunkmate and there are wards named for both Burt and Cleaver. This book may be his delusion. Huh?
At its worst, ''Gilligan's Wake'' is a weightless chain of out-there in-jokes, good bad puns, and smart dumb jokes. It more than once disappears up its own cathode-ray tube. And yet: Wow. In their wacky conflation of fact and fiction -- and their happy confusion of high and low brows -- the septet of stories amount to the carnivalesque daydream of a well-read Nick at Nite addict. Just sit right back and you'll hear a playfully paranoid history of the 20th century.
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