Wall to Wall

Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, Wall to Wall traces a modern Ulysses in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side—the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border—before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In Wall to Wall Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, Wall to Wall has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

"His aficionados commonly regard Wall to Wall . . . as Woolf's best novel; and the ease and shapeliness of this tale . . . make it the book most likely to convince readers new to Woolf that he is a major artist. . . . Woolf's work is single-minded in impulse—like Swift, a more obviously enraged but related ironist, he sets out to depict commonly ignored or denied principles of order. . . . On the other hand, Woolf commands a generously varied range of tone. Moments that are almost jokes . . . typically shade off into passages that seem like straightforward description but find the language playing sly little games with itself. . . . Douglas Woolf leaves things up in the air because he hopes that the feeling will be truly mutual—that we will not only help guide them back to earth but also agree with him as to when and how to do so. 'To my first friend' is the dedication Woolf attached to Wall to Wall. Relationships of that sort are what his work proposes." (Larry Kart, Tribune Books 5-1-94)

"[Woolf is] a good observer with a nice sense of the ludicrous." (Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review 7-7-85)

"Woolf's great qualities are a comic vision . . . and an independence of approach. . . . He has discipline and a sense of style. . . . If you want to re-experience America as it might have been seen by a Smollett, a Sterne, a Fielding or in places a Cervantes, don't miss [Wall to Wall]." (Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times)

"Wall to Wall is . . . a protean commentary on present-day America." (Donald Phelps)

"Douglas Woolf has a tone, always, of wry, persistently awake questioning, of a superficially bland but harshly abrasive content." (Robert Creeley)