New & Noteworthy Paperbacks

By SCOTT VEALE

Published: February 1, 2004
GILLIGAN'S WAKE, by Tom Carson. (Picador, $14.) Exasperating, uneven but infused with a trashy exuberance, this pastiche of a novel looks at 20th-century American history through the lives of the castaways on ''Gilligan's Island,'' with the likes of Holden Caulfield and Jean-Paul Sartre rubbing elbows with Gilligan (or ''Gil''), the Skipper, the Professor and the rest of the crew. ''Carson's prose often has the energy of a song by his beloved Ramones,'' David Kelly wrote in the Book Review last year. ''A reference to Clare Boothe Luce can sit alongside an allusion to Nabokov and be just as meaningful, or meaningless.''