Everyone reads Copernicus.
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The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
By Owen Gingerich (Walker, $25)
In 2002, Smithsonian astronomer emeritus Owen Gingerich published his magnum opus: An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex. That 400-page volume, result of 30 years burrowing through the rare-book collections of the world, describes in minute detail the 600 copies of two editions of the same book, in which the great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus asserted that the Earth revolves round the sun, not vice versa. Here, Gingerich takes us on what sometimes feels like a day-by-day re-enactment of his feat, library by mildewed library, page by annotated page, flyspeck by flyspeck.
The resulting Book should by rights be stupefyingly dull to anyone not professionally concerned with 16th-century star charts, early printing technology, and Renaissance penmanship, but somehow Gingerich's enthusiasm for his dusty subject, his innocent assumption that the reader will be as gripped by his quest as he was manages to keep one going through list after list of latinized Polish and German names, enigmatic geometric diagrams, and fuzzy photographs of crabbed scrawls in unknown languages. These latter are the real point of Gingerich's study, which was undertaken to discover whether Arthur Koestler was right to assert that nobody read Copernicus' great study of the heavens in the master's own lifetime. Well, thanks to Gingerich, we now know that Koestler was wrong, though after 300 pages and more footnotes than I've encountered since grad school, I'm still not clear whether I'm supposed to be pleased or disappointed. ROGER DOWNEY
Owen Gingerich will appear at University Book Store, 7 p.m. Mon., March 29.
Gilligan's Wake
By Tom Carson (Picador, $14)
Is it possible that the secret history of the 20th century can be read through the pop-cultural references of the baby boom? So it would seem from this ephemera-crammed fantasia (new in paper), one of the oddest and most inventive titles of last year. Each of its seven distinct sections is told by a different castaway from the famous sitcom. Each character seems only dimly aware of his or her future fate on the eternal island; that endlessly rerun TV existence stands parallel to their separate stories—all seven of which, in turn, bear a curiously parallel aspect. Yet in common to each is an even more embedded quasi-authorial presence—perhaps like the Architect in the Matrix movies—whom we might as well call G (not to be confused with God, however).
G isn't exactly Gilligan, whom we find—in veiled form as '50s beatnik Maynard G. Krebs, whom Gilligan actor Bob Denver first played on TV—in a Rochester, Minn., nuthouse. The very name "Gilligan" recurs in anagrammatic form throughout Wake, like a kind of genetic code, perhaps damaged, that all these stories share. And the stories are pretty damn entertaining. Here we have Ginger at a Palm Springs sex party with Sinatra, JFK, and Sammy Davis Jr. There's the Skipper as a World War II PT boat commander, again bumping into JFK. The Professor becomes progenitor to the CIA, a supercilious Cold War ogre fond of A-bombs and pansexual encounters. Mary Ann mixes with Holly Golightly, dates Jean-Luc Godard, and possibly inspires Breathless! Lovey (Thurston's wife) becomes a smack-addict lesbian lover to Daisy Buchanan on Fitzgerald's Long Island. And poor befuddled Thurston himself helps sponsor the career of future spy Alger Hiss. Among other political cameos are Nixon, Bob Dole, both Bushes, and Roy Cohn. On the celebrity-fictive front are Ed Wood, Holden Caulfield, Delores Haze, and Bettie Page.
Wake becomes a tsunami of the last century's detritus, a paranoid Pirandello-esque wallow in promiscuously mixed signifiers. The Skipper leads to Ernest Borgnine's PT boat pilot McHale, leading to a gag about Ethel Merman, Borgnine's future wife. The characters begin to rebel against their narratives and narrator; Ginger grouses about "a vapid situation comedy about some castaways." No one wants to be marooned in their own particular story; they're all trying to escape somehow, to get off their narrative island, perhaps to reach G (their maker?) back in Cold War America circa 1964 (when the show debuted, only to run four seasons), even while they sense that century is gone.
Tom Carson isn't merely delivering some slapdash pastiche. Every so often, he'll stop his billiard-ball riffing and deliver a clean shot of prose, like Ginger's description of JFK's "grin strikingly if oddly reminiscent of autumn leaves with a pack of Chiclets at the center." Becalmed in enemy waters, the Skipper recalls, "If there were a Richter scale for silence, we'd have been off it."
Espionage also runs throughout Wake. It is, in some sense, a political novel that charts the rise of the Cold War's military-industrial apparatus. A certain master spy named Jack Egan flits about each of the seven segments; and he has a certain boomer-age son who goes by various permutations of G—Gilbert, Gilly, Gil, etc. Is Egan Sr. real? Are the castaways real? Is Wake's increasingly dark chronicle—what Mary Ann calls "this flimsy, endlessly mutable, peculiarly clickety-clacking maze"—only to be believed as a construct of phantom G? Carson's sensibility is like Don DeLillo filtered through the Nickelodeon Channel; at a certain point, Hiroshima and Godzilla—yes, he's here, too—begin to assume equal importance. For poor lost G, wherever he is, whoever he is, it's all TV, all the time, with every channel being received all at once. BRIAN MILLER
