Delacorte, 307 pages. $6.95.

I HAD NO real conception of Detroit when I arrived there in June to spend the summer writing for its evening newspaper. Detroit is one of those places you read about but fail to comprehend. On the first day of work, though, I did realize that this city was ugly, class-conscious, industrial, polluted, depressing and depressed. I was quite happy to rent an apartment in Ann Arbor, forty miles away.

So, on those days when I had to go into the office, I would run right out to my car at 4:30 or five, race on to the freeway, race on home to suburbia. The Motor City remained a mystery.

But one night I got trapped there. There was late work to be done; I was exhausted; at eight I joined my newspaper friends for dinner. I did not leave the city to drive home until midnight. Strangely enough, that drive home turned out to be one of the most mind-altering experiences I can recall-perhaps only to be compared to Mick Jagger's appearance at Boston Garden last Thanksgiving.

For, as with Jagger last fall, that night I experienced the sensation of being truly and permanently fucked in mind and body. I had been in Detroit maybe six weeks, I had taken this 45-minute drive countless times-but this time, at night, it proved to be a totally different trip. The familiar sights along the way-the "biggest tire in the world," the River Rouge Ford plant (the biggest automobile assembly line in the world)-were all lit up against a terrifyingly black Midwestern sky, gassy, electrified. They rendered everything, myself included, impotent.

A few days later I read journalist Dan Wakefield's first novel, Going All the Way, for the first time, and, a few days after that, I came to the conclusion that the end will come in a car-the end of me, the end of you, the end of this country, the end of the world. An irrational belief, perhaps, but a firm one. I began to search around for others who felt the same way.

I did not have to look far. After World War I, when prosperity and a growing advertising industry boosted the car into the national consciousness, the automobile began to play an important part in our literature. Clyde Griffiths, the American Dream hero of Dreiser's American Tragedy, sets out on his destructive way after an afternoon joyride ends in a bloody smash-up. Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby resolves itself after a car crash.

Had Nathaniel West (who died in an automobile accident) been writing after the advent of the L.A. freeway system and Ralph Williams used-car lots, one suspects that Tod Hackett's apocalyptic vision in Day of the Locust would have been a mammoth car pile-up rather than "The Burning of Los Angeles." (Instead, Godard has provided us with the end-of-the-world traffic jam in his 1968 Weekend.)

The hero of James Agee's Death in the Family ends it in a car. Bonnie and Clyde are massacred in one. Post-war writer John Cheever has increasingly employed random automobile deaths-both in his last collection of short stories (The Brigadier and the Golf Window) and his most recent novel (Bullet Park). And what, for that matter, is Ralph Nader's real message?

Which all leads up to Going All the Way, an extraordinarily fine and likeable novel, a book that (among other things) adds another ominous link between our perception of the automobile and imminent national disaster.

THIS BOOK is set in that unlikely decade, the fifties, when nothing happened and everyone fell asleep. The setting is Indianapolis (of all places), and the historical-social landmarks of the narrative include Eisenhower, Brando, Joe McCarthy and the Red Menace, Dave Brubeck, Time, Moral Re-Armament, the Saturday Evening Post, Chet Baker, frats, the first jet transport, Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, the "new mature Sinatra," and drive-ins.

Willard (Sonny) Burns and Gunner Casselman, the novel's two central figures, grew up in Indianapolis, went to college in Indiana, and knew nothing outside of the Midwest until a strange war called the "Korean Conflict" forced them to leave home for two years. Going All the Way is the story of their return home after Korea, their friendship, and their attempts to "start a whole new part of life-the 'real part.' "

It is, of course, a story of growing up-at a time when America was standing still. At a time when American youth did not have TV, the Beatles, drugs, radical politics or literary gurus to point them in a direction unlike the one they had always known. Sonny and Gunner had only each other, their cars, and a vague desire for something different and more exciting as means for escape.

Their search takes them many places, but mainly to bars (for endless "brews"), hamburger drive-ins and to other hangouts where they hope to meet those dream girls who, as the phrase goes, will "go all the way."

But Sonny and Gunner are out of whack with their times and with their environment. Sonny doesn't see anything wrong with the Supreme Court desegregation decision, despite his mother's hysterical fears of a "darkening" of white Indianapolis neighborhoods. Gunner exercises his right to wear a beard and fall in love with a Jewish girl, despite the objections of his mother and his old "Big Rod" high-school jock friends.

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.