Bingo Under the Crucifix Laurie Foos Coffee House Press 190 pp. ISBN: 1-566-89-133-7 Available from Powell's Books.

You could then assume that Foos aspires to the philosophical work of Robert Musil and Nicholas Mosley, but a dumbed-down Hal Hartley is a closer fit. Foos has deliberately avoided any mundane description, accenting only the features of each player that are odd or distinctive. When you first see the name Chloe coupled with the profession of doll maker, you might think of a quaint Francophile homebody with nice clothes. Her lifestyle is far less modest, though. She's gained fame for her "Bingo Ladies" dolls that extends far beyond her small coterie of fellow doll enthusiasts, and she makes you imagine a world where people really do stalk the creators of that next Malibu Stacey.

Her husband Nathan, though not gay, is a party planner. He is renowned for scripting his parties on index cards, which means he's renowned for giving parties to people who can't differentiate interesting from boring gossip. The index cards are used to ensure that party attendees always know what to say, and apparently, people dig him playing God. He has gained enough confidence from his strange day job to also script an alternative persona for his wife -- Esther Bing. It's the Esther persona that Nathan decided would chain-smoke, and that's why Chloe has an alter-ego who chain-smokes throughout the day.

Chloe's father, Big E, is a retired competitive weight lifter. He persists in wearing tape on his hands and red tank tops (except on Christmas Day, when he wears a green tank top in honour of the occasion). He drinks whiskey, lifts weights, looks at porn mags, cooks Manwiches, and believes a man should "cleave" to his family. He took the last suggestion to heart because that's what a priest told him to do -- cleave is an important word to Big E.

Flo is Big E's wife. She speaks in non sequiturs, and is touchy-feely in her expressions of love toward her son, Ralph (whom Chloe renamed Irv in childhood). Aunt Chickie, her sister, is fatter. She's so fat, in fact, that she constantly applies Desitin to her inner thighs to avoid chafing. She also wears tissues under her bra straps to catch the everflowing flop sweat. (What a lovely touch.)

At first, these characters show some charm, but you'll quickly tire of Ralph/Irv, who has been mothered into a perpetual child, and of Flo's lame acceptance of his lack of maturity and fixation with Spider Man. Couldn't she at least demand he stop referring to his comic book hero as Spidey?

More annoying in every aspect is Darlene Mulholland, a 16 year old homecoming queen. She bears her child Bubba in a restroom stall, then goes to accept her crown while the baby disappears. This isn't Southern life. This is just bad TV.

At their best, the characters are somewhat reminiscent of Anne Tyler's Baltimoreans. They will occasionally be unique and harmless enough to seem like friends or neighbors who would add spice to your life. Ms. Tyler's characters can sustain this sentiment, though, because they exist entirely within the real world. Part of Foos's problem is her inability to give any of her characters a working-class life you can even comprehend.

Main character Chloe might have noticed this problem, so her character gets a driver's license and illegal Social Security card in order to appear more professional and businesslike. As you watch her chain-smoke, and flash her fake Social Security card, you wonder: what does Foos have against her characters? Why does she warp them so? Her double life is neither as sophisticated or as sensible as someone like Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can). She did not play up to stereotypes, but always stood contrary to them.

Foos's characters are wild and weird, unimaginable and stupendously dippy. It's as if a teacher told her to never, ever describe something that's been described before. But to use cue cards for conversations? That's so over the moon that the mere mention of the phrase "index card" drove me batty for the week I read the book.

All this strangeness-for-strangeness's-sake muddle overshadows the larger human questions that Foos is trying to discuss. Rather than ponder the long term effects of molestation, or wonder how one recovers the ability to trust, forgive and love after such an experience, you instead wonder why we should care that Big E wears red tank tops daily, but a green one at Christmas. What is that supposed to signify? Since Christmas is never even featured in the book, what does such a description reveal about the character?

That's not a petty comment, because an author's job is to pick and choose what to show us. Foos does not seem to trust her genuine sentence-making abilities; she is flat-out fearful that a scene from her book will compete with another scene from another book.

To get her points across, the author tries to wrap everything up in the book's final chapters. She fashions an epilogue in which Darlene, jailed for abandoning her baby Bubba, regularly writes Chloe about all the molestation issues previously mentioned. In spite of the fact that Chloe's obsession with Darlene is hammered home throughout the novel, it seems pat.

It's easy to admire Foos's craft -- she ties everything together as beautifully as a Dior corset, and roasts to bits any foreigner's first impressions of American family life -- but she's always going to be unsatisfying if she does not trust herself with human nature. As her characters do not breathe, laugh or tease like humans, there's precious little here that clarifies the subject of molestation as well as the Diff'rent Strokes episode on the subject.

-- Jenn Sikes

Coffee House Press is an award-winning, nonprofit literary publisher dedicated to innovation in the craft of writing and preservation of the tradition of book arts. Coffee House produces books that present the dreams and ambitions of people who have been underrepresented in published literature, books that shape our national consciousness while strengthening a larger sense of community.