Sons of Amber

WANDERERS EASTWARD, WANDERERS WEST by Kathleen Winsor. 947 pages. Random House. $7.95.

This is Kathleen Winsor's first major production since Forever Amber, and it is crowded with oversexed protagonists whose affairs would have put Amber to shame--or rather to virtue. It rides the trend to "authentic" westerns and is an authentic eastern as well. It has been grabbed up by two book clubs and by Hollywood. The funny | thing is, it's really not bad.

Although unnecessarily long and involved, Wanderers is a remarkable study of life in the ore camps of Montana and the mansions of Wall Street during the two anarchic decades following the Civil War. In spirit and detail it captures an era of predators.

In Boss Tweed's New York, judges, senators and city contracts were for sale, whisky and stocks were watered, refuse littered the streets, and night life featured everything from twelve-year-old chorus girls to a pack of trained fox terriers killing rats. In the West, road agents and fire swept the gold towns, gamblers and prostitutes cleaned up, and children entertained themselves by re-enacting the latest lynching. Such a climate is perfectly suited to the talents of the two characters who dominate the book. Giving up corporation law in New York for a squalid miner's wickiup, Matt Devlin soon stops digging and turns to honest usury instead, buying out the claims of desperate miners. On Wall Street meanwhile, his cousin Joshua Ching is even more brutal and even more successful.

Throughout, no fewer than 22 major characters clash, plot and love together. Matt Devlin is entertained by the bride of his brother, who dallies occasionally with the teen-age mistress of Matt's son Morgan. Morgan's married sister gets her kicks from his best friend, a mean and hungry panhandler who keeps disappearing into the arms that Morgan has just left. In New York, Joshua Ching's mistress is younger than his daughter Suky, who, in her turn, takes two men to heart, including Cousin Morgan, who, when in town from the West, shares a couple of Suky's husband's playmates. And so it goes. In short, the sleeping assignments are so intricate that they might have been handed out by a cross-eyed desk clerk.

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