The King of Cards

When successful novelist Thomas Fallon returns to Baltimore to receive an honorary doctorate, he is forced to confront memories of his youth and his encounter with Mad Jeremy Raines, leader of a milieu of sexy, enlightened souls. By the author of Red Baker.

Ward, best known for Cattle Annie and Little Britches but most admired for the somber proletarian novel Red Baker , has worked in Hollywood for years; as with Richard Price, scriptwriting seems not to have affected his prose style. In fact, style is not his strong suit; his writing is energetic and emotional but often clumsy, and his attitude toward his characters is unmodishly intense. What comes across powerfully in this novel, as in Red Baker , is Ward's passionate belief in seemingly unpromising material, which leaves the reader carried away (sometimes unwittingly) by the sheer creative energy involved. Once again the scene is Ward's native Baltimore and the hero Tom Fallon, a '60s youth grappling with literature at a minor college and a miserable home life. He falls in with Jeremy Raines, a hippie genius with a scheme to sell photographic student ID cards to America's colleges, and the story tracks Fallon's struggle between his desire to be a good student and his attraction to the heady involvement in Life (including sex, booze and drugs) that Raines and his clan offer. Though the novel is awkwardly framed by Fallon's return visit to his college for an honorary degree celebrating his success as a writer, the vital excesses of the '60s are wonderfully evoked, and there are some hilarious and touching scenes, as well as some melodramatic and highly implausible ones. Despite its faults, the book's pulsing vitality--as in the novels of Thomas Wolfe, a writer of similar faults and virtues--carries the day.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Back in Baltimore to pick up an honorary Ph.D. from his alma mater, Calvert College, novelist Tom Fallon recalls the wild year of 1965, when he wriggled out from under the patronage of elitist Professor Sylvester Spaulding and came under the spell of Jeremy Raines--con artist, lunatic, and entrepreneur--and the inmates of his communal house.... Jeremy is the inventor of the Identi-Card, a photo ID he markets to area colleges, with consistently maladroit results: the photos are misframed, or matched with the wrong names, or melted in the laminating machine. But charismatic Jeremy, ever in search of new funding, inveigles his loyal housemates--a Baltimore Brando, Eddie Eckel; health-food nut Babe McCallister; Sister Lulu Hardwell; and self-styled Beat poet Val Jackson--into shouldering his burdens and bailing him out of comic confrontations with Johns Hopkins president A. Taft Manley, Kodak front-man Alan Saxon-Hogg, and gangster Rudy Antonelli (not to mention such minor interlopers as crowbar-wielding Dan the Trucker, demanding that Sister Lulu, thrown out of the convent following an unlikely fling, return to his bed and board). As long as Ward (Red Baker, 1985, etc.) sticks to retailing Jeremy's shenanigans, Tom's affectionate reminiscences are often hilarious, but when he turns to the life lessons imparted by Tom's squabbling parents or his sophomoric rebellion against Dr. Spaulding or the kind of ``pure schematic bullshit'' that comes out in intense, run-on epiphanies or apothegms (``After only one maniacal afternoon with this madman, my entire emotional center had been displaced'')--then Ward, a generally successfully light humorist, gets stranded past his depth. And he gives short weight on his secondary characters--particularly his women, who do little more than change into a series of increasingly tight outfits for sex or photo ops. Affable and amusing, if, unlike the author, you don't take it too seriously. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Successful novelist Tom Fallon returns to his hometown, Baltimore, to receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater. During the trip, he reflects on his college days. The bulk of the novel is a flashback to 1965, when Fallon lived with a group of beatniks in a communal house presided over by Jeremy Raines, the "King of Cards." Raines and his crew are partners in an ID card venture, but their lack of business sense leads them into disaster. Fallon, meanwhile, struggles with his identity--is he working class, beatnik, or serious student? Unfortunately, Ward's narrative also struggles for identity. Seemingly unsure of the tone he should take, Ward shifts from a beat prose to more standard English. These shifts don't work, and the novel's unevenness, even if intentional, makes it unengaging reading. There may be demand from fans of Ward's Red Baker ( LJ 5/1/85), however.
- David Dodd, Benicia P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.