Beautiful Children: A Novel | 
|  | | | Title: | Beautiful Children: A Novel | | Author: | Charles Bock | | Publisher: | Random House | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 22 January, 2008 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1400066506 / 9781400066506 | | List Price: | $25.00 | | You Save: | $8.50 | | Amazon Price: | $16.50 | |
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Product Description
One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy.
As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what’s become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell’s vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.
In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemption–heralding the arrival of a major new writer.
Advance praise for Beautiful Children
“Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity. Beautiful Children is fast, violent, sexy and–like a potentially dangerous ride–it could crash at any moment but never does. The language has a rhythm wholly its own–at moments it is stunning, near genius. This book is big and wild–it is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment. A major new talent.”
–A. M. Homes
“Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart.”
–Jonathan Safran Foer
“Beautiful Children is the best first novel I’ve read in years–certainly the best first novel of our newborn century. Charles Bock has written a masterpiece: tragic, comic, sexy, chilling, far-reaching, and wise–at once an accusation and a consolation, and a lucid portrait of what is happening at the very heart of our culture, and what it means to be a young American today.”
–Sean Wilsey
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Customer Reviews:
• Beautiful Novel 14 April, 2008
This is a marvelous book -- vivid, passionate, heartfelt. I took a writing class from Charles some six years ago, and remember him as a man on fire for great fiction. He told us he'd been working on one novel for many years, to the exclusion of everything else. Frankly, I worried for him. I was working then as a book editor at Penguin, and knew that most books, no matter how well-written, are ignored; they never find the kind of audience that would justify ten years of devotion. I was thrilled to read the book and see that his commitment had paid off. And I'm ecstatic to see Charles's book get this great publicity, because the attention ensures that a lot more of the right people will find their way to his book -- and will be thrilled that they did.
Who are the right people? Those who want a funny, sad, angry, and above all accurate portrayal of life as it is lived for countless Americans today. Those who want a great story full of vivid characters and illuminating descriptions -- a book that sustains an intriguing mood as it moves between one unique person and the next, and takes you all kinds of places you've never been. It reminds me of Don DeLillo's "White Noise"; both books create an atmosphere that stays with you long after the details slip your mind. "Beautiful Children" takes a little time to gather its full momentum, but so do most great novels. Those who stay with it will reap a rich reward: a novel that will live with them long after they close its covers.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2RMVXUIMLKPUG
• Missing Kid In Sin City 28 April, 2008
Reviewed by Lynn Bee for RebeccasReads (5/08)
Charles Bock takes us into the dark and dirty world of Las Vegas, when a twelve-year-old boy fails to return home.
The child's mother, Lorraine, becomes obsessed with saving cats when she can no longer find her own child to rescue. Then she volunteers with Nevada Child Search, giving herself, and the reader, poignant hope for the many children who simply disappear each year. Her marriage disintegrates. Husband Lincoln manages to fulfill his job duties, but finds pornography as a pitiful and dismal release.
The prose is powerful and the characters more than disturbing. Newell Ewing, the missing boy, is spoiled, snotty, self-centered and all too typical. His rootless friend Kenny is old enough to drive and introduce Newell to many of the seedier dives and activities of Vegas. There's a stripper with a good heart and implants that have hindered her sexual pleasure. She's a well-developed and almost likable addition to the cast. Her demanding boyfriend is a scheming porn courier. The insider views into stripping and the porn business are fascinating. Then there's a semi-successful comic book artist with lots of issues, out for a little degenerate pleasure in Sin City. The myriad alienated teens, thoughtful, yet unthinking, tug at the reader's heart, mind and soul.
This is a crude, rude, and consuming story. Bock deals with teen sex, drugs and isolation, adult despair, and society's problems as a whole. The details of Newell's disappearance are both connected and disconnected in this disturbing first novel. Bock even manages to add touches of humor, and a list of resources for tracking missing children.
The subject matter of "Beautiful Children" truly interested me, yet I felt parts of the tale were overlong and repetitive. However, Bock demonstrates a masterful grip on both the real and surreal in the city of Las Vegas.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3O14YPDXQGJ03
• Boring 15 May, 2008
This has to be one of the most boring books that I have attempted to read in a long while. The dilogue serves only to narrowly portray bizarre and generally uninteresting and boorish characters. There is no story, no plot, no thread, except for a commonality in a venue -- Las Vegas. If this effort is truly, "heralding the arrival of a major new writer." the book world is in for a great gain of obscurity.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A393V66O9K3R9L
• Decent 09 June, 2008
somewhat disappointing after all the media attention this book received. can just picture Bock sitting in his dark little apartment, relishing his every sentence. not that there's anything wrong with that...but the writing seems too self-conscious. reminds me of a cheesy film noir. the theme that ties it all together is poorly and over-done. not even really that good a picture of las vegas.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2ANGGN75N5HWN
• Moments Of Brilliance 03 May, 2008
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-
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1RZU0AMACWSFQ
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