Word: bingo
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...Tracks for no good reason), finds in the fourth telling of the story that not much has changed. That's good; most of the same powerful characters are still around causing trouble, some as hovering spirits, some as living beings. A few years have passed, and in The Bingo Palace (HarperCollins; 274 pages; $23) we are close to present time, but reservation life is still a shabby, cross-cultural muddle. And Erdrich, herself part Chippewa, part German- descended white American, is still a wry, intuitive, blood-related observer and a gifted writer...
Love Medicine was loose and episodic, but the structure of The Bingo Palace seems all but aimless. So does real life most of the time, but unless Erdrich is herding her large cast toward a fifth novel that will pull things together, the reader is entitled to a bit of head scratching. Over most of its course, the new book seems to focus on a love affair that young Lipsha Morrissey never quite convinces beautiful Shawnee Ray that she should dive into with him. (His failure may have something to do with an unsuccessful vision quest during which...
...here is the ghost of old Fleur Pillager, forced from her land by the building of a gambling casino, the bingo palace of the title: "She doesn't tap our panes of glass or leave her claw marks on eaves and doors. She only coughs, low, to make her presence known. You have heard the bear laugh -- that is the chuffing noise we hear and it is unmistakable. Yet no matter how we strain to decipher the sound it never quite makes sense, never relieves our certainty or our suspicion that there is more to be told." The author...
...route as an Avon Lady. Since her eyesight prevented her from getting a driver's license, she rode a little Amigo scooter. "We were always telling her, 'God, would you slow that thing down?' " says Mary. Sue's customers made their own change. She hooked rugs and played bingo and, by general consensus, spoiled little Danny. Every Sunday, when he was old enough, they would bicycle to the Guardian Angels Church nearby for the 10:30 Mass...
...after being born. His brother Kenneth was born a decade later. So Wynn, a child his mother describes as precocious and sometimes devilish, was not just an ordinary firstborn: he was a sacred child. Meanwhile his father, Michael, was often away from their home in Utica, New York, supervising bingo parlors he owned in three states. "Steve ruled the roost," says Wynn's wife Elaine. "Mike was not home, meaning that there was no paternal supervision. Zelma was a pussycat. She didn't have the -- I don't want to say the knowledge or instincts -- but maybe not the patience...