BOOK REVIEW : Wacky Walk on the Wild Side : THE MYSTERY ROAST, <i> By Peter Gadol</i> , Crown $21, 288 pages

It takes Peter Gadol a few pages to hit his stride in this, his second novel, but when his witty, nearly antic voice finds its pace, it takes us deep into a fantastical world that, so close to our own, is unexpectedly engrossing.

Eric Auden--a guileless and rather innocent young man--has been living unhappily in New York with his mother since being dropped by his wife and fired from his job.

Vowing, one winter’s day, to break out of the inertia that’s gripped him since the divorce, he takes a sentimental journey to one of his fondly remembered childhood locales, the New York Museum of Art, and finding himself in an antiquities gallery closed for renovation, serendipitously steals an important Cycladic idol.

The heist of the idol--soon a major tabloid story--releases Eric from the grips of his recent listlessness in ways he would never have imagined.

Timothy, a childhood friend whom he runs into at the museum, brings him to live in a loft on the far west side of New York, and introduces him to his odd circle of friends: Timothy is an artist who works, like his models, in the nude; Inca is an eccentric, beautiful designer with whom Eric falls immediately in love; Andre owns and runs the failing Mystery Roast Cafe (named after the secret mixture of coffee, ever different, served daily), where Eric goes to work after moving into a loft above.

Gadol has the knack of taking his mad characters seriously without condescending to them.

They’re all larger than life, caricatures really, much like Maurice Sendak drawings: exaggerated and irresistible, they’re presented with such unfailing good humor we can not but care for them as much as Gadol evidently does, even though none of them are entirely believable. When we first meet Inca:

“Her complexion was snowy, her eyes a pale jade. . . . ‘Gimme a vhiskey,’ she said to Andre. A low, simmering voice. ‘And don’t be stingy, baby.’ That was what Eric heard, although what the woman probably said was something more like, ‘Andre, I could use an espresso. Make it a double.’ ”

*

Structuring and pacing the narrative, the idol, in the successive avatars of its new incarnation, sits at the center of the novel.

From a magical inspiration to Eric and Timothy, who have the brilliant idea of reproducing it and selling the reproductions in the cafe, it begins to gain an underground notoriety. A mass-market exploitation by Eric and Inca spread the idol around the city, where everyone seems to want to buy one, and inevitably, it is sold by the thousands, all over America.

Now, as Eric’s fortune grows toward the very high six figures, his whole world comes to revolve, as if magically, around the idol.

Gadol’s mistakes are those a real writer makes as he learns, rather than the slick ones we’ve come to expect from the hip and hollow young products of the trade fiction publishing machine.

Most evident is a certain emotional immaturity in his characters’ relationships, a lack of complexity, a tendency toward caricature rather than characterization.

There’s a world of romance, for instance, in Eric and Inca’s love affair, and while, in their idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, they are compelling as individuals, as a couple they never really come to their full life.

This feels like a young novelist’s failure entirely to develop--or as the poet Diane Wakoski would say, mythologize--his fictional selves; as individual portraits, they stand alone, but they lack sufficient imaginative life to interact in a satisfying way.

But it’s an honest mistake in an unusually talented and good-humored book, filled with generosity, to his characters, to his readers. Far more important than its faults, this is a book with a solid feeling--the feeling of a step in a developing body of work that holds tremendous promise.

Let’s hope that Gadol sticks with it and that, perhaps more perilously important, his publishers stick with him.