As the two pals drink away the hot summer, fighting with parents, wondering about Communists and existentialism, they find themselves increasingly trapped in the world of Moral Re-Armament and rat races that their parents have bequeathed to them. Temporary relief is found in wild (and funny) masturbation orgies and sexual fantasies, which somehow never seem to make their way into reality.

Real escape can only be found by getting in the car and driving away. They finally decide to go to Chicago ("Chi"), where Gunner has a vague offer to work for an ad-agency. "They came roaring into Chi through a night torched by the steel-mill fires, eerie and hellish," writes Wakefield. They reach a curve in the road and Sonny fumbles, realizing it is "too late, too late even to put on the brake." They head straight into a cement abutment and then smash.

TOO LATE. Even though the crash enables Sonny and Gunner to throw off their parents and begin life on their own terms, you can't help but wonder what exactly it is that the heroes are beginning. What is in the pot when you go all the way to the end of the rainbow?

It is only necessary to recall the decade Sonny and Gunner were inadvertently hurled into-one of political assassinations, absurd war, and tumultuous racial strife-to appreciate the futility of their journey. If you can escape one car crash, you live only to be propelled into the big new one around the corner.

In this way, Going All the Way casts a whole new light on the "silent decade." This novel makes us look at its Midwest, mid-century setting as a world of life-and-death importance. The Fifties are not only the light before the storm, but the storm they herald is one from which no one can escape. As deadpan funny and low key as Going All the Way is, it nonetheless instills a very real and tangible paranoia. Each time I hear the sound of smashing glass outside my window, I can't help but wonder if I am witnessing the beginning of the final, biggest crash of all.