Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Bock, C. 2008 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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 ofBeautiful Childrenare "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 forBeautiful 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 Childrencareens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart." --Jonathan Safran Foer "Beautiful Childrenis 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
Author Notes
Charles Bock is the author of Alice and Oliver: A Novel and Beautiful Children, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This debut shows plenty of ambition and promise but could use a streamlining of subplots. The author casts his native Las Vegas as a microcosm not only for America, but for the human condition as well. At the hub is the Ewing family, Lincoln and Lorraine and their 12-year-old son, Newell, who all appear conventionally (if a little complacently) happy until Newell falls through the city's cracks. Though the central chronology documents the night of Newell's disappearance, flashbacks (and flashes forward) show that the boy wasn't that happy after all. If he were, he'd be the only one in this novel who is. There are many spokes to the plot, most of them tangential. There is the stripper and her boyfriend (verging on pimp), who urges her to get breast implants and coaxes her toward a porn shoot. There is a geeky graphic artist, with the improbable jazz-homage name of Bing Beiderbixxe, who has a scheme that involves both 3-D tattoos and the stripper. There is the dead-end high-school kid who receives encouragement from Bing and who befriends Newell. There is a hallucinatory episode among a homeless pack including a nameless girl with a shaved head, a pregnant girl, a dog and a vampirish hustler. Many of these people converge on a late-night punk-rock bacchanal in the desert, which serves as a sort of climax without bringing the plot full circle. And there are Lincoln and Lorraine, who come to suspect that their son was the only thing holding their marriage together. The tone varies from titillating close-ups of the adult-entertainment industry to background information on runaways that sounds like a public-service announcement. (It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?) On some level, everyone is a predator, and any beauty that these children once had has been either taken from them or bartered. Remember Ordinary People? This could have been titled Pathetic People. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
What seems initially to be another missing-child story turns more sordid, exposing the underbelly of Las Vegas, its setting, and the precarious lot of runaway teens. When 12-year-old Newell Ewing, a generally dislikable kid, doesn't come home from an evening out with a teenage friend, his parents take refuge in videos of their only child as this crisis threatens their marriage. The narrative moves backward and forward from the evening of Newell's disappearance, with unflinching details of depravity and street life described in separate story lines about a comic book artist, a stripper susceptible to the entreaties of her mooching boyfriend who works for a porn movie maker, and street kids, one of whom remarks that Vegas is a good place to run to. Bock's characters are well drawn, he works to tie his plot threads together, and he clearly cares about runaways (to the extent of listing resources for parents), but his debut novel deflates too abruptly at its close. More raw than its title suggests, this is not for the weak of stomach or faint of heart.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Charles Bock, the son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers, spent much of his childhood behind the counter of his parents' shop, staring out at desperate adults as they hocked their most precious possessions in hopes of restoring their luck. "From the back of the store," he recalls on his Web site, "I'd watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It's impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved - to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone." After he left town, ending up on the East Coast for an M.F.A., Bock retained his searing memories. Now in his late 30s, he has spent a decade transforming them into his first novel, "Beautiful Children." In it, he brings together the intersecting lives and innermost thoughts of parents and adolescents, strippers and nomographers, runaways and addicts, gamblers and comic-book illustrators, setting them against the neon-lit, heat-parched backdrop of Nevada, where "high walls and gated communities" join together in the night, "shimmering as if they were the surface of a translucent ocean," and the colored towers' of the Vegas Strip resemble a "distant row of glowing toys." What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo. Like a whirling roulette wheel, "Beautiful Children" presents a mesmerizing blur. Imagine each vivid slash of color as a character, with his or her own impetus toward loss and stubborn striving. Bock slows or stops the wheel at will, bringing each slot into saturated individual focus: "The lens zooms in, then draws back." There are far too many to describe in detail - a grieving salesman, cold-shouldered by his wife, consoling himself with porn at the office; a slender nameless teenager known only as "the girl with the shaved head," who has a near-terminal case of attitude and seeks perilous thrills at a desert rock concert; a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies; a midget convenience-store clerk; a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips. So let's fix on just one: Ponyboy, a buff, tattooed, opportunistic wastrel, salivated over by drugged teenage girls as "Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful," and leered at by an obese porn distributor nicknamed Jabba the Hutt. At the age of 20, Ponyboy pictures himself as a "pimped out Jedi" knight with a "kung fu grip" as he delivers X-rated videos to porn shops by mountain bike. He revels in the whine of the tattooer's drill each time he gets new ink: "Electricity lit up Ponyboy's skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravangza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy's nostrils." Bock's evocation of experiences most people will (mercifully) never share, and his depiction of each man, woman and child's personal mythology is ravishing and raw. Each time he sets the wheel spinning, the mind races, tracking memories of distinct images amid the whir. As in a casino, all sense of time - and of day or night - disappears, as we wait to see where the ball will land. The story revolves around the disappearance of a surly 12-year-old on a hot Nevada night The boy, Newell, is the son of Lorraine Ewing, a prudish former showgirl, and her husband, Lincoln, a casino sales rep who gave up his dream of playing with the Dodgers when the "halfhearted low fives" of his teammates showed him he would never cut it: "Lincoln had the curse of being good enough to see just how much better he needed to be." Trapped in his "own personal cage," he lacks the will to rein in his son's rebellion. "You hit a certain point in your life, fact is, you clemently rejoice in your son's truancy, you actually want your child out on the town, disobeying orders, breaking his curfew," Lincoln tells himself. "Tasting his first beer. Chasing a good time. Trying to eat the world." Sometimes, Lincoln rationalizes, in order to bond with a child, you have to let him go. But what if your child goes and, like thousands of American kids each year, doesn't come back? What if, many months later, the last proof you have of his existence is a washed-out image of a "slouching, unexpressive child," Photoshopped and "circulated in e-mail attachments, faxes and flyers," tacked up in "arcades and student unions and youth hostels; in post offices and convenience stores and drop-in centers for the homeless and indigent" his age eventually replaced by his date of birth because "nobody can say how long a child will be missing." Newell's mother torments herself, endlessly revisiting her son's room, wondering what clues she missed: "How were you supposed to know? A 12-year-old boy is attracted to darkness. To special effects and sarcasm. Saying no when any idiot could see the answer was yes. If every boy with a short attention span and a propensity for smart remarks abandoned his life, who would be left?" Newell vanishes on a Saturday night during a sullen joyride with his greasy-haired teenage outcast friend, Kenny, whom he bullies and patronizes. As Kenny drives, Newell cracks open the window, looking for passersby to blast with a stolen fire extinguisher and thinking of all the things he wants to be when he grows up: "jet-setting billionaire secret agent with a heart of stone; superhero who sneaks around in darkness and comes up behind terrorists and slits their throats; international jewel thief on a Harley with mounted laser guns." Children don't understand the reality of the future. "Adulthood," Bock writes, "with all its responsibilities and implications, is as impenetrable to a child as Martian trigonometry. That is one of the beauties of youth. And it is why someone has to be there, vigilant" The fact that adults can't always be vigilant - can't anticipate the moment when the kid they're trying not to alienate will make the awful, wrong decision - is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this splendid, disturbing novel. As Bock also shows, adults can't even protect themselves from awful, wrong decisions. Early in the novel, Newell, Kenny and Beiderbixxe, the cartoonist, meet at a Saturday talk in a comics store called Amazin' Stories, where Beiderbixxe has come to discuss his illustrated series, "Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut" Newell isn't impressed. Too young and undereducated to pick up on Beiderbixxe's ironies, he's bored. "Honestly, it wasn't exactly easy to get jazzed about Bing Beiderbixxe," he thinks, puffed up with preteen scorn. "From the looks of things, Newell wasn't alone in this opinion The store was largely empty, just a few underclassman types solemnly wandering the new arrivals racks, and three or four guys standing a respectful distance from the autograph table, nodding and listening, but seeming unconvinced." Reading that scene, I remembered the time, last fall, when I unwittingly stumbled on Charles Bock, reading from this book at a now-defunct club called Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction. Bock had chosen a selection about the girl with the shaved head and the attitude, and as he spoke, transmitting her self-consciousness, slick with the clichés that are as much a part of a teenage girl's wardrobe as lip gloss, I couldn't anticipate the art that lay behind the larger work. I pouted like Newell, didn't get it. Coming across the scene again in the novel, I sheepishly saw that its "limitations" were only the natural ones of a girl who could be no wiser, at 15 or 16, than she was. In "Beautiful Children," Bock's vision and voice create a fictional landscape as corruptiy compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival - illustrating what he calls "the nobility inherent in struggles that cannot be won." Charles Bock's first novel revolves around the disappearance of a 12-year-old Las Vegas boy. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Booh Review.
Library Journal Review
A 12-year-old vanishes in Las Vegas, leaving his parents to search desperately and fall apart on their own. A debut with a big push; note the eight-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.