FASTEN SEAT BELTS PLEASE. The light blinks on overhead, we sink into our seats and careen off into the wild blue '80s. And it becomes harder and harder to analyze and thus understand the slothful indulgences and psychotic tendencies of that great unruly beast, the American Imperium. Our best writers have tried--and mostly failed--Pynchon, with the wondrous Gravity's Rainbow, a critical mass of incendiary pages, and McGuane, with his taut vision of love and death in the Florida Keys, 92 in the Shade. No wonder there is so much yearning for that time of the superego run rampant, the 1960s. Where is Norman Mailer '43, who many felt understood that time better than any American writer? Feiffer strikes a universal key: Don't you wish we still had Nixon to hate? Meanwhile, he and Mailer probably voted for Carter, just the same as you and me. The sentiments are still there--as Mailer wrote in 1958, the shits are still out to get us. But who are they? Definitions blur, and only one thing remains clear. As Dorothy said, (and as one of the chapters in Gravity's Rainbow begins)-- "Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more."

And where we are is John Irving's The World According to Garp, a world where "an evening could be hilarious and the next morning could be murderous."

Now this book came out some months ago. Every leading culture vulture has taken his shot at it. It is still hanging in there at the number 14 position on most best seller lists. In the literate little womb of Cambridge, full of cocktail party chitter chatter, you're probably only safe if you say, "I've heard about it and I'm waiting to buy the paperback."

Forget hedging your bets. Just read it. It is the finest novel of the year. It is the finest novel of most years.

The book is a biography of the noted author T.S. Garp, from his conception in the hospital where his anonymous soldier father, tail gunner Garp, is slowly dying and his independent mother Jenny is working as a nurse, to his assassination on the mats of the Steering School, his Putney-like alma matter, and where he serves as wrestling coach. He is shot by an Ellen Jamesian as he tweets his whistle and boys grapple around him.

"In the world according to Garp, we are obliged to remember everything." Or are forced to--like the Ellen Jamesians, bizarre creatures that flit through this often terrifying and macabre book. The Ellen Jamesians are women who have cut out their tongues in order to remember the case of Ellen James. Ellen James was an 11-year-old girl who was raped; her rapists then cut out her tongue to prevent her from describing them. What they of course forgot was that Ellen James could write. She wrote descriptions of her assailants, and they were caught. Later she comes to live with Garp, and develops into something of a real writer. But she doesn't care much about the Ellen Jamesians; imagine, cutting out your own tongue?

The World According to Garp is mostly about the true final frontier--human sexuality, the hysteria and madness and cool fun and hot passions therein.

Not least the madness and the hot passions. It's a violent book, almost to the point of being gory. Among the "selections" from Garp's work included in the book is "The World According to Bensenhaver," in which a woman stabs to death the idiot farm boy who rapes her. One of the most horrifying (and at the same time, exhilirating) passages in recent memory involves Garp driving his children home from the movies. He has a habit of turning off the lights and coasting the family Volvo uphill and into his garage at night. Moving slowly, he rams the rear end of the station wagon where his college professor wife sits in the front seat giving a farewell blow job to her student lover. One of his sons loses an eye; the other is thrown into the sear and killed. Garp himself breaks his jaw, which prevents him from screaming when he sees that his wife has bitten off her lover's member.

Not least the cool fun. Garp's trusted friend is the transsexual Roberta Muldoon, formerly Old Number 88; the crack-backing, pass-catching Robert Muldoon, star tight-end for the Philadelphia Eagles. When Roberta finally dies, there is a moment of silence before the Eagles take the field. "She had a great pair of hands," the announcer intones reverently.

If the art of the future is framed in political terms, no one better understands the sexual division of labor than John Irving. His first three novels are Setting Free the Bears. The WaterMethod Man, and The 158-Pound Marriage. They went nowhere, but they are being re-issued in paperback. It seems that this book was written for much the same reason that Faulkner sensationalized Sanctuary--after three, the author begins to wonder where the fame and fortune are. But underneath the sensationalism and violence there is a very good book. The best of 1978. We're landing, and who knows where or on what. But we're not in Kansas any more.