At the core of Alan Michael Parker’s Bingo Bango Boingo is its major formal premise: stories laid out in the 25 boxes of a bingo card. Unifying the variation you would expect in any project with an iterative form, the stories, bingo card and non-bingo card alike, are interested in fate, chance, and possibility. This interest leads each story into new territory, exploring different characters and the array of possibilities they encounter. As one hopes would be the case in any work with an iterative form, the bingo cards thus have an inherent relationship between their form and their content: the chance inherent to the game of bingo is represented by the small snapshots and options each story presents.
Possibility is, too, inherent in the reading of the bingo cards. When reading the first, the reader is presented with a challenge: How do I read this and where do I start? The first story is instructive in this regard. While some of the bingo cards contain clear narratives, the collection’s first bingo card, “Change Your Life Bingo,” is structured associatively, almost akin to a lyric poem. While this means you can enter this story from any direction, my first approach was to read it as I would a regular story: left to right across the five boxes, moving down a row each time, an approach that I would often repeat, though not the only way I found to read the stories. That Bingo Bango Boingo asks the reader to think about the book on the very level of how to approach the stories stands prime amongst the factors that make it so engaging. Each possible way of reading the bingo cards creates a slightly different story, highlighting or juxtaposing different elements. As we read and reread each story, then, we share in the journey of so many of the collection’s characters, diving deeper into a search for more options, more possibilities.
Central to the bingo form as well is that in each of the bingo cards, the centerpiece is bolded, adding emphasis that can serve as a turn, punchline, or statement of theme, to name just a few examples. I’m glad that, considering my familiarity with bingo, I didn’t originally think to look at the center box when reading the first poem, as its bold text “Listen” acts as a surprising turn after the somewhat more whimsical suggestions earlier “Can’t sing? Join a choir” or even the serious-but-understated “Try someone else’s God.”
The bingo card’s open-endedness works best in jumps like these. So often in the collection, stories turn through tonal, discursive, or narrative shifts box by box. In “Union Sation Bingo,” for instance, the tone is first whimsical and mundane, before switching to a more serious tone, something more deeply human. The way in which chance can be as simple as it is in the opening square, “Suitcase loses a wheel” but as emotionally valent as the great ‘what if’ posed by column-four row-four’s “If only you had apologized.” Once you open the door to possibility, the unexpected has a way of finding its way in, and the bingo cards are at their strongest when they utilize these options, each box of the bingo board a little doorway.
Roughly half of the stories in this collection forgo the bingo mode, opting for a more standard flash fiction presentation. In contrast to the tightly wrought bingo cards, these stories, rarely longer than two of the slim collection’s small square pages, allow for more elaboration on the book’s concerns, a fun subversion of the role flash normally plays. Take, for instance, “Speculative Fiction,” the premise of which has the narrator reflecting on a part of his life that seems to him like he was “the star of a bad novel.” This allows for a deeper exploration of possibility’s negative expressions: consequence, failure, and regret. While the bingo cards also explore this sub-theme, in “Speculative Fiction,” we get to see this play out in a longer form narrative encompassing a deeper sense of time and consequence. Though just as effective as the rapid-fire jumping of the bingo cards, it offers a different scope and reading experience, providing the collection with a rhythm and texture.
In keeping with the flash stories’ traditional narrative approach, some of the bingo card stories operate with similar, less associative narrative structures. These pieces offer their own unique flair as well: they compress the narrative and its tensions so intensely that the flash pieces feel lengthy by comparison. A standout in this regard is “Cut Thumb Bingo.” Read left to right, it shows the progression of the narrator’s thoughts: “It’s not bad” to “It’s bad”; a conversation with Siri that dramatizes the narrator’s realization of the wound’s severity; and, completely unexpectedly, the narrator’s epiphany that they’ve fallen in love—all of this interspersed amidst boxes providing queasy details (“The nasty smile of a cut”). How human this moment is, the mundane and ugly experience of cutting your finger somehow coexisting with the out-of-the-blue realization that you’re in love. The boxes of the bingo cards require brevity, sharp snippets of thought, feeling, or narrative, and ferry the reader from one box to the other in rapid succession, delivering the whole scene across large bounds in perspective and scope. Maybe a minute or two of action passes in this story, yet the form allows for the full drama of the moment to unwind in such a way as to make the moment and the manner in which it’s been written feel larger than they really are.
When viewing the collection as a whole, Bingo Bango Boingo almost works like one of its bingo card stories in macro. Each story offers insight into one of dozens of characters’ lives, a different possibility, the encounters they’re facing; each story is almost like a large window into the grand bingo board of the collection as a whole. Each turn of the page invites another chance encounter, sure to touch the reader, or make them laugh, or make them consider the opportunities that have led to where we are, the possibilities we all still have.
