Beautiful Children: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A wide-ranging portrait of an almost mythically depraved Las Vegas, this sweeping debut takes in everything from the bland misery of suburban Nevada to the exploitative Vegas sex industry. At the nexus of this Dickensian universe is Newell Ewing, a hyperactive 12-year-old boy with a comic-book obsession. One Saturday night, Newell disappears after going out with his socially awkward, considerably older friend. Orbiting around that central mystery are a web of sufferers: Newell's distraught parents, clinging onto a fraught but tender marriage; a growth-stunted comic book illustrator; a stripper who sacrifices bodily integrity for success; and a gang of street kids. Into their varying Vegas tableaux, Bock stuffs an overwhelming amount of evocative detail and brutally revealing dialogue (sometimes in the form of online chats). The story occasionally gets lost in amateur skin flicks, unmentionable body alterations and tattoos, and the greasy cruelty of adolescents, all of which are given unflinching and often deft closeups. The bleak, orgiastic final sequence, drawing together the disparate plot threads, feels contrived, but Bock's Vegas has hope, compassion and humor, and his set pieces are sharp and accomplished. (Jan.)
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From The Washington Post

Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock's exceptional Beautiful Children, so much as the starting point from which he explores the survival strategies -- usually doomed -- of the citizen-mutants themselves. He proves an expert guide, being a native of the city with an encyclopedic knowledge of every perverted nook and narcissistic cranny. His ability to share a deep understanding of America's million or so lost street kids and their tormented parents gives the book a whiff of greatness.

The story begins with 12-year-old Newell running away from his home in a suburb of Vegas. He is foul-mouthed, cynical, needy, cute, emotionally exhausted, an old-before-his-time product of the city, but he is not fleeing anything like sexual abuse, poverty or starvation. His mom and dad adore him, and, as his mother reflects, "They had tried to give Newell everything he had wanted. Where was the crime in that?" In other words, he is spoiled and given to tantrums. By implication, he decides to join the hordes of America's street kids because it is impossible to find a path to adulthood in a world that has no knowledge of such a thing. His parents are not bad but, as damaged goods themselves, have very little structure to their relationship beyond sex, and not much talent in relating to their child or each other.

The novel presents a cityscape inhabited by a sub-species of homo urbanus: young men and women who embody an obsession with sex so bizarre that sodomy is merely the platform from which they bungee jump into a moral void of alarming practices. Cheri Blossom had her nipples cut open so that she can use them as candle holders for her floor show; Bing Beiderbixxe is a bald undergrad nerd whose imagination works exclusively in the realm of pornography; Ponyboy is a late teen coiffeur-conscious deadbeat who improbably drops toothpaste drool on his backside. Kenny, a gay virgin whose childhood was spent touring pawnshops with his wacky gambling aunt, picks up our young hero in his dilapidated "FBImobile," makes inept passes at the kid and, equally ineptly, offers to take him home, an opportunity that Newell half-heartedly rejects.

"What am I supposed to do," Kenny asks at the end of the book, not only on his own behalf but in the name of lost and confused humanity. "Just what am I supposed to do now?" All these characters stand alone in paranoid isolation, even when they are having sex with each other.

Beautiful Children is not an easy read, nor is it a polished work. Bock's moments of simple honesty are far more impressive than his poetic flights of fancy, which can seem gaudy and pretentious, and one wishes his editor had persuaded him to cut the manuscript by a third. The two-speed time structure, ingenious though it is, can be an irritating impediment to understanding who is doing what and when. Put simply, the book needs to be read at least twice before one can grasp its full scope -- a stiff requirement, coming from an author who is painfully aware of the limits of the modern attention span.

And yet this novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter and the sensitivity with which he treats it. As I considered Bock's work, Lawrence's opening to Lady Chatterley's Lover, "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically," rattled constantly through my brain.

Beautiful Children is also about the aftermath of war -- not merely Iraq, although that is mentioned -- but more important "the war of all against all," which seems to have been raging for at least a couple of generations. That war is, as Bock demonstrates, destroying our kids with the demonic ingenuity of modern drugs and technology, not to mention the demise of the family itself. In the no-man's-land of Bock's Vegas there remain only the survival strategies of the hopelessly inept young. I cannot think of another novelist who has dared to attack this most pressing and complex issue so ferociously.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400066506
• ISBN-13: 978-1400066506
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #280,653 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars surprisingly disappointing, February 7, 2008

By	Brooklyn reader (NYC) - See all my reviews

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.

38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Our Critics Have Lost Their Minds, March 5, 2008

By	Tom Badyna (New Suffolk, New York) - See all my reviews

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as I'd hoped..., April 8, 2008

By	J. Ehrlich "music addict" (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It is unfortunate -- you can tell the author wrote this book with love, concern and painstaking attention to every single word, but it just does not work. It bounces around in time and never quite lets you know exactly where you are (like titling a chapter, "One Week Before" or something equally inane, yet helpful!). The thing I found incredibly annoying was the inconsistency in the characters. For example, one chapter discusses the relationship between the parents, Lincoln and Lorraine, and talks about their "being there" for each other; their underlying love for one another. Next you read that they really can't stand each other and both are miserable. Next we find that Lincoln seriously loves Lorraine, but Lorraine cannot stomach Lincoln's annoying ways. Well, which is it??

One character is simply called "the girl" and although terrible things happen to her, we never find out her name or her age. I did not find this to be telling of a culture, or an era, or anything else. It was simply contrived and annoying.

The book is full of bad things -- gross, horrible, shocking -- but there are so many words... pages and pages of words... used to describe these events that in the end, you simply feel like you're traveling in an overheated car in the middle of the desert. This is what mind-numbing feels like.