Bingo Under the Crucifixby Laurie Foos

(Coffee House Press)

The title and loud, obnoxious cover of Laurie Foos’ latest novel seem to promise a rollicking, irreverent account of “growing up Catholic”. Readers, though, will find Bingo Under the Crucifix to be an introverted, rather sardonic tale that smacks of magic realism. At least, I thought of magic realism when I read about a man turning into an infant. Then I realized, it wasn’t just arbitrary weirdness—the book works at a psychoanalytical level, a sort of “Freudian realism” if you will.

Everyone in the book is just a little off their rocker. Chloe, our protagonsist, makes her living creating dolls of bingo ladies that she sells at doll conventions. Her husband, Nathan, is a party planner who has a neurotic tendency to script everyone’s dialogue with index cards. And her brother Ralph (Irv) is a Spider Man fanatic who, in the crisis of responsibility occasioned by his wife being pregnant with their first child, reverts to infancy himself. Ralph and Chloe’s mother lives only for her son, while their father, a retired weight lifter known as “the Big E”, wears red tank tops every day of the year (except for Christmas, when he switches to green). Finally there’s Aunt Chickie, who stuffs tissues in her dress and smells of Desitin. Freud would have had a field day with this gang, and the deadpan comedy that ensues when they gather together to determine what to do about the infant Ralph plays out like a whacky group therapy session. As the Big E himself says, “It’s a goddamn freak show.”

Meanwhile (as the comic books would say) we have a high school homecoming queen giving birth in the girls’ locker room and leaving the baby to accept her crown. Her story is relayed to us in the form of tabloid headlines (aliens are, of course, involved). Part of the fun of Bingo Under the Crucifix is trying to figure out how the two stories are interrelated. Zany as she often is, however, Foos does have some serious things to say about families, and that emotional baggage that seems to stick with us well into adulthood. With Chloe the focal point is bingo:

They played bingo on Thursdays at the same Knights of Columbus where Irv and Ruth and her mother still played every week. Sometimes Chloe went along but didn’t play, doodling her name instead in the margins of her notebook while her mother and Irv searched their cards for the numbers being called. Sometimes she begged not to go, to sit in the corner of the gym and watch her father’s muscled neck bulging, his high platinum flat-top shining in the lights. But her mother always insisted that she join them, declaring bingo a family night and the gym full of hulking men no place for a young girl to be hanging about. Chloe liked to watch her father lift, but Irv preferred bingo.

In fact the novel gets so deep into family psychology it neglects the plot and characters. The narrative all but crawls in the middle of the book, and the characters repeat their little quirks over and over again, like a comedian trying for one too many rejoinders. Even at a hundred and ninety pages, Bingo Under the Crucifix seemed a bit too long; I think it would have been better as a novella, or even a long short story. Still, it’s worth the patient read—this is not a book you’ll forget any time soon. Me, I’m still trying to figure out how bingo fits into the Freudian meta-scheme. Foos, who is from Long Island and now lives near Boston, was recently here on a reading tour and I asked her about it. Like a typical writer she evaded the question, so I’ll just have to speculate. Perhaps bingo represents that ultimate Freudian wish—to be the special one chosen by god, the lucky one, the winner.

- Joel Van Valin

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