In the modern novel's never-ending quest for madder music and stronger wine, Edward Hoagland's queasy non-hero [of "The Peacock's Tail"]—the unhappy, suburban-bred Ben Pringle—sounds like an old and well-worn record. Ditched abruptly by his girl, he suffers with perfect pitch in the key of Moses Herzog minor. Let down by shallow friends when he seeks commiseration, he mimes Holden Caulfield's anguished wisecracks. Checked into a swinging, madcap Harlem hotel to escape familiar memories, he runs on endlessly like Tom Wolfe—the pop-prose WOW! of middle-class discovery snapping faster than a string of penny-crackers.

Sad-sacked Ben, too tender for the wooden touch of adults, takes refuge in the company of the multiracial kids who inhabit the "Aspinwall Hotel." He drops into a comfortable infantilism of fairy tales and fun and games with this redeeming, healing bunch who, despite his ardor, seem suspiciously like an amalgam of settlement-house...