RIVERSIDE DRIVE, by Louis Simpson (303 pp.; Atheneum; $5). A prizewinning poet (Good News of Death and Other Poems) here turns his talent to novel writing for the first time, with notable results. His hero, Duncan Bell (like Simpson, the son of a well-to-do Jamaica plantation owner), migrates to New York, where his progress is interrupted by the war, a bout in an insane asylum, a pubescent female panther, and several rounds on a psychoanalyst's couch that are complicated by Bell's self-destructive delusions of creative ability. Eventually Bell faces his own limitations and moves to California to help take care of...
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