Don’t Stop the Carnival was published by Doubleday in 1965 and is Wouk’s comic novel — a deliberate departure from the serious historical and social fiction for which he was known. Norman Paperman, a forty-nine-year-old Broadway press agent suffering a midlife crisis, abandons New York for the fictional Caribbean island of Amerigo and buys the Dorado Beach resort hotel, imagining a life of tropical ease. What follows is a cascading series of disasters: the plumbing fails, the generator explodes, the staff steals, the building inspector demands bribes, a corpse appears in the cistern, and a hurricane approaches.
The novel operates as pure farce — each problem solved creates two new problems, and Paperman’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain order in the face of Caribbean chaos provide consistent comic momentum. But beneath the comedy is a sharper point: the dream of escape is always an illusion; you bring yourself wherever you go; and the competent, organized New Yorker is no match for a culture that operates by entirely different rules.
The novel has become a cult classic in the Caribbean hospitality industry — hotel owners and island expatriates recognize the truth of its comedy, and “Don’t Stop the Carnival” has become a catchphrase for the particular mixture of beauty and disaster that characterizes Caribbean life for transplanted mainlanders. Jimmy Buffett adapted the novel as a musical in 1997.
Collecting Don’t Stop the Carnival
First edition (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1965): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10