“You feel doubt. You feel shame-for what? Come sit beside me. Do not worry about the dirt-you were filth before you got here.”
Put your rave hat on. It’s time to get excited about a book again. It’s Bingo’s Run by James A. Levine. I have to admit to a prejudice against reading novels written by physicians. There seems to be a whole subgenre of them. Clinical technique doesn’t easily translate into expressive storytelling skills. The respect for detail is there, but not the flexibility, the ease in fictional “lying” and the play of language.
Doctor Levine has demolished my bad attitude. Bingo”s Run wraps the reader into engagement with its text. Why should you love a slum kid who’s a drug runner in Nairobi?
Bingo’s Run opens on a three hundred yard mound of garbage in a ghetto on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital city. Krazi Hari, cloaked in flies, lives on the mound. His friends, obese and obtuse Slo-George, and short and fleet Bingo, derisively referred to as Meejit…meaning midget…find morning recreation in throwing stones at Krazi Hari, who retaliates with invective.
No one is sure how Krazi Hari learned to read. But he reads everything with print that he can lay his hands on in his empire of sewage: scraps of paper, labels, a torn off fragments of magazines or newspapers.
Parentless Bingo, about high school age, is the first person narrator and James Levine’s strategy is deft. These characters don’t talk like they graduated from Yale, they speak in Kenyan street slang. After one chapter of adjustment you’ll get it and fall into line with the language and misspellings.
Here’s the deft part: the quoted dialogue is in slang but when Bingo relates the story, Levine employs a lucid, neutral English that’s as understated as a beige wall. There are also brief sections in a third person voice which narrate the eloquent African mythology that provides a divine backlight. It seems the old gods are favorably inclined toward Bingo. But we all make our own choices. There’s “Destiny 1” or “Destiny 2”. You’re choosing.
There are 69 brief chapters in Bingo’s Run plus a last, unnumbered “The Last Chapter”. 287 pages. Some chapters carry the story arc propulsively forward, others are more episodic. Narrative strategy: A Plus.
Bingo is a runner. That’s his state of being. It’s also his job. He delivers drugs. His grandparents have been slaughtered. His mother has been murdered in front of him. Her last words to him were to run. As a drug runner, Bingo’s dress code is “Be no one.”
Bingo attends services at St. Lazarus where he’ll get a free meal if he endeavors to be saved. He likes the Ten Commandments but prefers his own which number 13. I’ll quote the first and the last: 1. “Run do not stop. If you stop you are nowhere.” 13. “Run alone.”
Memorable characters populate Bingo’s Run. Few are good, most are hustlers, some are prospects for the garbage heap. If you love a good con, then you’ll love Bingo’s Run which is full of them. The whole novel is a con…but when a whole novel is a con, we call it art. You won’t regret running with Bingo and that’s a Three Guys promise. The publisher gave me a copy. Thanks Spiegel & Grau.
