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Going All The Way
Foreword
by Kurt Vonnegut, Afterword by Sara Davidson
A
classic novel of the 1950s
"Going
All The Way is the 'Catcher in the Rye'
of the Midwest. Like all great books,
it somehow manages to preserve the mood
and texture and morality of its time and
place. A bestseller in 1970, it is Dan
Wakefield's most famous novel. It seethes
with pent-up frustration and confusion,
and nearly every episode bubbles with
hilarity. It is a book that so perfectly
captures its time and place that it transcends
the specific and becomes universal, which
is as good a definition as there is of
a classic.
As one of our very best journalists in
the past decade, Dan Wakefield has been
conspicuous for two virtues: a novelist's
instinct for the right detail, the gesture
or glance which can tell more than a thousand
words of interpretation; and then something
even rarer, an intimate, yet never merely
egocentric, scale of observation. He has
always tried to maintain the tone of a
personal deposition, and like his hero,
Thoreau, "speak as a man in his waking
moments to other men in their waking moments."
At the same time, unlike the similarly
ambitious Norman Mailer, he has avoided
rhetorical boom and self-idolatry. He
is closer to another of his heroes, Murray
Kempton, and at least two of his reportorial
collection, "Between the Lines" and "Supernation
at Peace and War," are handbooks no young
man or woman dreaming of a career in journalism
should be without.
In
his first novel "Going All The Way," he
remains a sure observer. Again and again
there are tableaux of root Americana that
are as certain and exact as so many Goya
etchings: middle-aged salesmen carousing
in a bar, a Moral Rearmament peptalk,
Sanforized newlyweds displaying the heir
to their prefabricated ranch house, a
countryclub poolside.
Around
them flows a passionate and tormented
novel about the summer of 1954 as it transpired
in the lives of two young Korean War veterans
returning to their Indianapolis homes.
To
say that it is a very American story is
true enough, but it would be more relevant
to say that it is going to become even
more so. Its central subject -- the baffled
despair of young men trying to reckon
with middle class, material values in
a world where they no longer suffice --
is only beginning...it is possible that
the current publishing season will produce
no book more urgently felt."
--
New York Time Book Review, August 9, 1970
"Wonderful,
sad and funny;
a scathing portrait of middle America
through the eyes of a new fictional character
who will inevitably be compared to
Portnoy and Holden Caulfield." -
- Gay Talese
"Reading
Wakefield's novel
feels, in some ways, like reading
an anthropologist's notes on an extinct
culture.
And yet, below the surface quaintness
--
the talk about 'hard-ons' and 'Big Rods'
--
is a timeless story about young men
and about America growing up."
-- Sara Davidson
author of "Loose Change:
Three Women of the Sixties"
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