ALTHOUGH she is displayed with far more completeness, the human heroine of East Side, West Side plays second fiddle to the city of New York. Jessie Bourne’s adventures during the October week in which she finally comes to a decision concerning her intolerable marriage are the normal stuff of fiction about long-suffering ladies, and it is the author’s detailed and loving description of the city where Jessie lives that really carries the book.

Not that Jessie is an unattractive character. Her only faults are excessive patience, an inability to bear with aristocratic stupidity, and the intense preoccupation with her own affairs which is natural in a person without any employment beyond luncheon, cocktail, dinner, theater, and supper parties. The life she leads is not natural to Jessie, who is the daughter of an energetic Jewish actress and dislikes her husband’s fine old Knickerbocker family far more than the family dislikes her. When Jessie meets Mark Dwyer, an Air Force general with tastes and background similar to her own, she takes action against the Bourne tribe.

The novel is populated by an army of minor characters, carefully observed types whose plausibility derives largely from Jessie’s reactions to them. Because East Side, West Side is told consistently from one point of view, the reader never knows what motivates anyone but Jessie herself. This hardly matters in regard to the rabble of party-goers, servants, and remote relatives swirling through the book, but the ingenious nastiness of Brandon Bourne, having no visible excuse, seems in the end a bit contrived. Dwyer, of course, benefits by purely external presentation, as knights in shining armor always do.

The diverse origins of her people give Marcia Davenport the opportunity to describe New York at several levels and at several periods. She does it. wonderfully well, shifting from past to present, from slum to desiccated women’s club to first-night party, describing all of them with enthusiasm and a sharp, affectionate, ruefully cynical eye.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS