THE KING OF CARDS by Robert...

THE KING OF CARDS by Robert Ward (Washington Square: $10; 324 pp.). Ward’s coming-of-age story has a rambunctious energy that is difficult to resist. When narrator/novelist Tom Fallon returns to his alma mater to receive an honorary doctorate, he recalls the tumultuous mid-’60s, and how he came under the spell of the improbable, charismatic Jeremy Raines and his “completely self-indulgent, wildly crazy, and yet deeply humanistic” entourage. A good editor might have curbed Ward’s taste for scatological humor; like Jeremy, the results are simultaneously engaging and frustrating.