Crosstown Busload

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (376 pp.]--Marcia Davenport--Scribner ($3).

Marcia Davenport lived through some straitened days on New York's upper West Side, but she graduated to better things when her mother (Alma Gluck) became famous as a singer. Author Davenport now lives in the high-rent East 70s and is the author of such best-sellers as The Valley of Decision and Of Lena Geyer. East Side, West Side is a glimpse at these two worlds. It straddles Manhattan in the manner of a crosstown bus, picking up a sampling of the city's polyglot population and giving them a good shaking-up as it goes along. At journey's end, only the well-heeled passengers are badly bruised.

The book's central character is an unhappily married socialite who lives in a world of blue leather engagement books, French beds, alabaster lamps and gold pillboxes. But she finds it a sterile life, and when a brigadier general comes along she follows him back to his garlicky East Side origins. In an atmosphere of cracked oilcloth, leaky sinks and potato pancakes, she discovers the simplicity and goodness that is missing in her own world.

The comparison between the bad rich and the good poor is far too familiar and too pat. The characters she means to portray sympathetically emerge as sentimentally unreal. But her nightclubbing set is alive with sharp-nailed women and men whose roving eyes seek trouble and ensue it.

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