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 Beautiful Children: A Novel
Description
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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 WilseyEditorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
Reviews
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Author: Guest
he might be as good as a young denis johnson, with similar talent at his command. perhaps it's true that the novel could have been edited a little, a few lines cut here and there, but such an objection seems picayune when you're looking at the magnificence of the achievement. i mentioned denis johnson; one could also compare bock to early robert stone. vivid, memorable characters, memorable images and prose. the best first novel in quite a while.
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Author: Guest
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.
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Author: Guest
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.
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Author: Guest
Charles Bock takes readers to the seamy underside of his hometown of Las Vegas. We meet the denizens of a dark world, runaways, sex workers, grifters, thieves. Who are these people? Where did they come from? How did they end up in this horrible place?
Bock draws some fine portraits here. In doing so, he gives us the opportunity to sympathize with these damaged souls. These people come off the page as real, with all the flaws and scars of the once "beautiful children" who have been sacrificed on the altar of a society that discards young people like fast food wrappers.
Sure, there's a plot here but for the sake of not spoiling you, the potential reader, I'll just say; let Bock take you away. He writes like a gambler on a hot streak.
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Author: Guest
I spent many years traveling around the country and saw these kids everywhere...in every city, these casualties of the casualties, trying to survive in a broken America. This book moved me. I found these characters truthful and conveyed with compassion and eloquence.
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