Book Review

This is not your grandma’s bingo. Dzanc Books published Bingo Bango Boingo, Alan Michael Parker’s latest book of short stories, this past February. Alan Michael Parker has been around the writer’s block—he contributed to nineteen books as a writer or editor, taught at Davidson College and the University of Tampa’s MFA Program. He won a ton of awards (too many to list here) and earned the compliment “a general beacon of brilliance” from Time Out, New York.

Bingo Bango Boingo is experimental, a book consisting of alternating bingo cards and short stories; seventy-four in total, if I counted correctly. The short stories are short-short, most only a page or two long. The bingo boards are literal bingo boards, each phrase contained in 5×5 boxes with titles like “High School Reunion Bingo,” “Mickey Falls Asleep At Work,” “Allison’s Library Adventure,” and “Hooping at the Y.”

The phrases within the fictional bingo-board squares contain actions, phrases, and situations that the characters inevitably interact with: “First Day Bingo” has squares like “How early won’t feel late?”; “One POC”; and a packing list, “The blue pen, the Post-Its, the paper clips, the other Post-Its.” Another, “Long Marriage Bingo,” features “Only a few secrets,” “I gave you that scar,” “Dinner in five,” “So it’s only a cough?” and my personal favorite, “You’re in a room even when you’ve gone.”

The scenarios felt familiar even when they were foreign, maybe because Parker made the characters feel so real. Readers meet Dr. Ozan, Phil, Allison, the Cuellos, twins Stella and Bella, Evelyn in Finance, Tyler the kid, Tim the weather guy, Rick, Suzie, Aunt Sarah, Luis, Lilly, Abdul, and Maggie, to name a few. These people are not related and never cross paths, their only connection being in this book, there to offer snippets of poignance drawn from their regular lives and strange circumstances before moving on. This book, like bingo, is fun, flash, moves quickly, and is often unpredictable.

When you play the game, bingo boards tell you exactly what to hope for: B10, N32, O74. You know what will inevitably happen, that at least one of your numbers will get called, and you will either win or lose, depending on the luck of the draw, and you will play for as long as the game takes. Much like bingo, Parker’s characters do not have any agency over what numbers will be called and can only hope these situations go according to plan and work out in their favor.

The stories can be beautiful—Parker knows how to wield a purple pen artfully, so his descriptions are notable, but not overwhelming. I loved his phrases: “The news in the country comes by wind: the world here is the weather,” in a short story called “Meeting Someone Once for Five Seconds,” and “The vows like hummingbirds” on a bingo card describing an autumn wedding. It takes talent to tell a story on a bingo board, and do it dozens of times, each time full of emotion and something new but touching all the same. This book contains multitudes, with characters extraordinary in their realness whom you forget as soon as you read the next story. Parker seemed afraid to go any deeper than a two-page snapshot of a life, perhaps giving readers whiplash from one section to the next. But after reading some more, turning the stories over in my head, I changed my mind—it occurred to me that the dozens of stories are all half-written and seemingly random for the reader’s benefit. At least one will stick with you, and if it doesn’t, you don’t have to dwell on it; just move on to the next. One section of Parker’s book was about a plumber, the next about a man named Phil imagining the afterlife, and the one after that “Long Marriage Bingo,” then “Grandma Challenges Nurse Pamela to a Footrace.” Each of these characters work with the cards (bingo boards?) they were dealt and transform within them. In these bingo boards, Parker demonstrates how quickly life moves, how different each person’s circumstances are, how we have to work with the cards we’re given.

I doubt this book would have been published by a first-time author. Parker is a writer who has earned the freedom to break the rules, whereas I am an undergraduate with zero books to my name. So what did he do with this literary freedom that I’m maybe a little bit jealous of? He broke every rule in the book. There is no setting, no one plot, and a lot of characters in these seventy-four short stories who each have their moment to shine in one page or less. And that’s where this book is innovative, fresh, and entertaining.

At the end of the day, it’s just a game—have fun.