Customer Reviews

Beautiful Children: A Novel

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

What I want most from a novel is to be transported and totally taken up into a character's world, and in those respect I couldn't connect with this novel. I found the lost child plot surprisingly leaden, just like the style and tone of the most of the rest of the book. Other commenters have said, this book tells more than shows, and I'd agree with that, and just add that the fact that so much of the prose is summary and a series of lists and litanies added to that deadened, flat-footed quality. It's also the reason, I think, that these characters don't really feel distinct from one another--the author too often conveys their lives in list and summary rather than creating scenes that live on the page. The places that are described don't feel particularly real to me--having been to Vegas and having seen it on television and in movies, I wanted to see the city in a new way, and in this book the imagery felt too flat and familiar.

Reading this book brought to mind a number of titles that do similar things much better. Those looking for a much stronger nerd character ala Bix should read Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which an irresistible character is conjured with a lot of verve and warmth. For a multi-layered, multi-character exploration of a dissolute city, I'd highly recommend Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You, which tempers pathos with a dark humor and also a sense of compassion, and has a lot more depth than this novel. On that note, also Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion--you get the layers and points of view in the context of characters who are so real that it hurts.

Without doubt, Charles Bock's BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN is a novel of extremes, and readers' reactions are likely to take that love/hate form as well. Some will find Bock's writing bluntly searing, his scarred adolescent characters sympathetic, his message of a lost generation tragic. Others will be repulsed by his wallowing in the social underbelly of America's national underbelly, Las Vegas, or they will reject his literary pyrotechnics as gratuituous, semi-pornographic, too-clever-by-half attention-seeking (a notion only too readily confirmed by his scruffy visage and too-punk-by-half-for-a-Bennington-College-MFA website). I found myself leaning with admiration more toward the former attitude than the latter, although I can see a multitude of reasons for some readers to reject this first novel and its subject matter out of hand.

Bock's story follows two alternating timelines, predominantly in an uncertain present with an undefined future as backdrop. In the novel's present, a single night marked by chapter headings showing the evening's passage of time, a hyperactive, disaffected, and distinctly unlikable twelve-year-old named Newell Ewing cavorts through Las Vegas in the company of a bizarrely codependent older boy named Kenny, an insecure, aspiring comic book artist. As Newell and Kenny wind their way from a casino floor to a 7-Eleven convenience store and ultimately toward a desert night punk rock concert, their story is sandwiched by the same evening's travails of several parallel lives - a young hustler named Ponyboy, his artificially enhanced stripper girlfriend Cheri Blossom, a runaway named Lestat and his drugged out pregnant traveling companion, Danger-Prone Daphney, a shaven-headed teenage runaway girl, and an older, moderately successful comic book artist improbably named Bing Beiderbixxe.

The author sets these disparate stories against a second time frame, three or four months in the future, focused on Newell's parents, Lincoln (an event salesman for one of the Vegas casinos) and Lorraine. In that near future, Newell is a missing child who disappeared on the night of that desert concert and has not been seen since. Bock examines the couple's deteriorating marital relationship and their conflicting ways of coping with Newell's unresolved disappearance - Lincoln through rational hope and immersion in his work, Lorraine through watching old video tapes of her son when she's not saving abandoned cats and taking on other lost causes.

Slowly but steadily, Bock leads his "beautiful children" toward their climactic convergence at the desert concert, where the facts of Newell's disappearance will presumably become clear and the knowledge denied to Lincoln and Lorraine will be bestowed upon the patient reader. It would be too much of a spoiler to describe how the author handles this reveal. Suffice to say, the resolution is wholly consistent with the rest of the story and the characters' troubled lives.

Bock's hometown of Las Vegas becomes, for him, the shining city on the hill, the irresistible magnet drawing toward it the runaways and other adolescent refuse of American society. His portrayal of these young people is blunt and, at times, disturbingly graphic. Yet he avoids moralizing about emotionally absent parents, uncaring schools, or a corrupting consumerist culture. Instead, he paints a tragic picture of what is without asking why. Are his characters overblown, little more than caricatures of street life for runaways? Probably not, more likely a compendium of types and instances brought together in a single place. Through it all, however, the movie in Cheri's head finally offers the author's own view, spoken in a wimpled nun's soothing voice:

"My children, you are human for your sins and God loves you for your humanity. It is your sins that make you beautiful. But this does not necessarily give us license to do whatever we wish. And here I want you to listen carefully. What I am about to say is very important." Regrettably for Cheri and the rest, that's where her imagined screenplay ends.

I wanted so badly to love this book. I feel for the concept and dug in deep for the story. In the end, I felt like I was the one doing most of the work. Charles Bock had talent, but Beautiful Children sputtered as badly as the FBI-Mobile in the story.

Bock made me dizzy. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy multiple points of view and don't mind moments of confusion, but Bock drained me. One page of text in particular jumped into the heads of no less than four characters. It wasn't difficult to follow, but left me disconnected with everyone involved.

The one true sparkle of the novel was Bock's ability to describe the pain and aimlessness of Newell's parents. He got me there, reached me. For that, I believe Bock can deliver the goods with a different story.

I also thought his use of punctuation and sentence structure was puzzling. I realize it's his art and he deserves the freedom to flow without the restraints of accepted style. It didn't bother me, but if that sort of thing bugs you, don't read this book.

In the end, nothing really happened. The characters were interesting, but they didn't do anything. If he had condensed his 432 pages into 150 and then followed with story of interaction and consequence, Bock would have a winner.

I don't pick up a new book but wanting to say "Five Stars," and wave it about, "Our book, our culture." I'm tired of feeling embarrassed for our newbie writers when compared to their European and South American counterparts. But the best I can say for Beautiful Children is it's a tour de force of puerility. I read it and couldn't but think that Mr. Bock is as absorbed as his characters in the culture of the video games, pornography, comic books and the screaming, screeching music described in this book. To think that a thirty-eight year old man had written this creeped me out, pure and simple. It didn't even read like an act of pedophilic voyeurism, which might be to Mr. Bock's moral credit, though not his literary one. The book has no heart, no vision, no ethos, no esthetic, nothing but a kind of cheap, copped morbidity - the stuff of a puberty stretching on interminably.

If this book were handed to me as a manuscript, I'd hand it back with mild pleasantries like "Okay - you've done the research ad nauseum, shown that you can imagine the second-by-second thoughts of an insipid character moving through a pointless minute of an inconsequential life, now tell a story, and, if it comes to you, toss in maybe one or two redeeming minutes." If I were feeling charitable, I might add, "Just as you seem to confuse dirty underwear for grit and truthtelling, you also confuse bad grammar for literary style."

Mr. Bock, no doubt about it, has an aversion to direct, Anglo-Saxon verbs, which, in this book, are outnumbered by nouns by a thousand to one. Also, and worse, he loads sentence after sentence with strings of descriptive clauses, most of them beginning with a present participle. I counted one stretch where twelve consecutive sentences were of such construction. It all gives the narrative the urgency of a slow doggie-paddle in a cesspool.

The book says nothing, is little more than faux nihilism sans courage, supported by presumptions of sap.

Our critics, our editors, our agents, have lost their freaking minds.

I was very happy to see that two literary novels about Las Vegas have both been published recently (The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr and this one). What I liked about both of these books is that they were a sympathetic look at downtrodden people. They also are both wonderfully evocative in terms of descriptions of Las Vegas. Otherwise though, these books are really so different as to almost not be comparable. But about this book:

This is a very difficult book to get though and connect with. There are some great scenes but it never really comes together. There are many characters and plot lines (too many really) and the story of the central character, Newell, a missing 12 year-old, isn't enough to hold it together. It feels like the author over reached and tried to do too much. The result is some great scenes but an overall concoction that's not quite right.

A beautiful, beautiful novel that is hilarious, poignant, and provocative. The fragmented chronology is incredibly effective--each chapter recounts a short stretch of time during the August night when the preteen Newell disappears amidst flashbacks and flashforwards following the ten main characters. Anything that might seem unclear falls into place by the end, and through their stories you become attached to all of the characters, who are usually frustrating or repulsive or stupid, but who are all intimately, lovingly explored. It's incredible how Bock loves each one, refuses to reduce any of them to a caricature. They are all--from the stripper to the cracked-out, pregnant, homeless teen to the 12-year-old brat to the tertiary figures in the pawnshop and the porn rings--memorable and vivid. The one I did miss for a while was Bing, the overweight and geeky comic-book artist with a million-dollar idea, but his metaliterary last scene is perfectly placed, and you have to miss him for a while to be ready for it.

Bock's prose is raw, surprising, and always interesting. He experiments with chatroom dialogues, imaginary screenplays, epistles, epic catalogues, and free indirect discourse with enthusiasm but restraint--never too much at a time. There's even one illustration that is funny and ridiculous.

Frankly, the negative reader reviews on here are crap. How can you wonder, "is this book showing an '80's punk scene or present day?" when the characters in the story-now time sequence (that fateful August) remember the Columbine school shootings, World Trade Center attacks, and the war in Iraq? Further, the suggestion that Bock neglected his research into missing children is blatantly ludicrous. The book gives an extensive description of an outreach program (like the ones the author sites in the end notes), and the "sort of phone call.. you receive" could be, um, a phone call from someone with your kid when they ran away... like Kenny. Moreover, the strained relationship of Lincoln and Lorraine following Newell's disappearance is one of the most well-developed and intimately nuanced threads of the novel. And, yes, there were non-white characters in the text, and anyway for many of the characters, you don't get any suggestions about race. How can a novel that includes such a diverse character cast be "narrow"? Finally, the accusation that Bock throws in everything, "including the kitchen sink," to me is not an accusation at all... if you're going to write a novel, go ahead and write goddam Moby Dick.

Cheers to Bock; he deserves respect and renown for giving the world another good book.

Charles Bock's hypnotic debut novel follows the ricocheting lives of several people in Las Vegas, whose lives intersect and separate in dramatic ways on the night that twelve-year old Newell Ewing disappears forever. But the narrative isn't only focused on that one night, but on the myriad ways that the characters have been led to this point in time and, for some, where they will go from there. You see, on the night of Newell's disappearance these people have been driven to the edge - and Bock wants us to understand how they got there. Bock shows great skill at characterization, I found every one of the characters compelling and thought it was mesmerizing to witness their unraveling as their circumstances and choices brought them to a boiling point.

"Beautiful Children" is about some seriously damaged people, some trying desperately to get out of their ruts and some determined to self-destruct. The Las Vegas setting looms large here, because it seems like every opportunity in the world is within reach, but they can't take advantage of it. Bock's characters are down in the dumps in a city where instant fortunes are supposed to be regular occurrences and happiness is there for the taking - at the right price, that is. Fortune is like a mirage in the desert heat, and Bock uses the parallel well (growing up in Vegas certainly helped him understand the city's highs and lows). But there is also a sense of renewal and hope burning through these characters - a palpable desire to be a better person. "It is your sins that make you beautiful. But this does not necessarily give us license to do whatever we wish." And it is this sense of overriding hope, an astonishing achievement in a first novel, that makes "Beautiful Children" such a great novel.

But Bock's first outing does have its flaws, too. There is one character that gets a fair amount of page time but never overcomes his peripheral-to-the-plot status, making time spent on him feel irrelevant. As Bock brings us back and forth in time it is occasionally jarring to figure out just when this scene is taking place (he also makes one or two errors in his chronology that don't exactly help matters - for instance, toward the end of one character's storyline he doesn't yet possess the cell phone that he has already used to call his girlfriend in her plotline). And while I appreciate that Bock didn't make Newell the saintly-kid-that-goes-missing cliché that most writers go for in order to garner sympathy, did he have to make the kid such an insufferable jerk? He's so irritating that you actually want bad things to happen to him, and it doesn't really jibe with the all-too-abrupt conclusion.

Having said that, I believe "Beautiful Children" marks the arrival of a fierce new literary talent in Charles Bock. Forget what the haters say, the novel's strong points far outweigh its faults, and if this is what Bock can do in his first novel, well, I for one can't wait to see what he has in store for his second.

Grade: A-

PS If you like this, check out Junot Díaz's excellent The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

If you've ever passed an able-bodied 20 year old and thought "Get a job", watched a group of 13 year olds kids drinking in a park and wondered about their home lives, or seen a 19 year old stripper hauling her bag into a seedy club and asked yourself if she wants to be that, this book will engage you. It's about damage, both personal and cultural. An unsparing tour though a numbed, desperate, decadent world created for tourists' pleasures and fast money. Not a flattering picture of a culture that really exists.

Early in my career I worked with runaway kids and this is the most unsparing and accurate story I've read, written with some poetry and love, but little varnish.

I definitely agree with one of the other reviewers that you will either love or hate this book. I loved it. It is very realistic in the way it portrays the thoughts of the characters and the hopelessness and destructiveness that teenagers feel. I was extremely impressed with the thoughts and descriptions of the complete breakdown of Newell's parent's marriage. This is not the type of book I usually like. I don't often enjoy all of the endless wanderings of each characters train of thought and of actions that are not in the present, but in this book they worked and truly enhanced the story.

I can understand why reviews range from excellent to poor. The book is a strange mix of both. Here are my random thoughts:

1. The author sometimes describes brilliantly the emotional dynamics of life, such as his portrayal of a marriage going wrong. The subtleties of various human emotions and reactions to a cold shoulder here and there and the interplay between men and women on various adult levels is excellent.

2. I did not enjoy the disjointed time frames, moving back and forth to the beginning of the story to the end of the story, long winded sidetracks of characters that are never fully developed and have little to do with the actual story. In his attempt to be clever and profound and to give us and insightful, well written tale, I ended up a bit dizzy being forced to try to figure out what is really happening and when.

3.We are left with a pretty lugubrious view of life. There was a tiny bit of hope and here and there when some of the characters such as the stripper Cheri, might realize that her boyfriend is a dope, some of the lost children may make it back home, etc., but the only real story here is how life sucks sometimes and it's particularly bad in Las Vegas. Nothing about the story is hopeful, there is no redemption. Certainly life may really be this way most of the time, but why not leave us with a little bit of hope?

4. I thought the portrayals of the porn world and the stripper world were remedial, even though it seemed like he's trying to carefully open our eyes to the horrors and realities of these worlds. Gosh, the husband ended up in a strip joint and watched dirty videos! And, the strippers don't really like the guys they're dancing for and are mostly abused girls from sad homes! The people in the adult video business are phony creeps!

5. There is a lot of excellent writing and carefully designed verbiage. It reminds me of Tom Wolfe's writing sometimes, not a lot of beautiful adjectives and descriptions, more descriptions of horrible things through creepy actions. However, because of this very device, I found it hard to follow a lot of the action, like there was no coherent reason why characters are scared and moving here and there.

6. The book just ends. I reminds me of the movie "No Country for Old Men." If you're like me, you won't shed a tear, you'll just kind of feel empty.

My overall grade: C+ maybe B-