Beautiful Children: A Novel - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

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. These “urban nomads,” each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, weave their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.

In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock captures Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance, providing 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.

Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

surprisingly disappointing February 7, 2008
63 out of 73 found this review helpful

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.

2 out of 5 stars

I had really high hopes for this... January 25, 2008
42 out of 65 found this review helpful

but it's a difficult and rather messy read. There are mind-numbing passages where the author breaks the cardinal rule of fiction: show don't tell. He tells you over and over again how to feel instead of letting the characters in action show you how to feel. The chronology is impossible to track -- flashing forward and back in time -- though without impact.
The characters feel wooden -- almost charicatures. The word tricks and meandering passages are overwhelming. There are some incredibly well-written sections -- though that doesn't make a novel.

I think the dialogue could be improved greatly and really wished this thing was half the length. And the ending -- ugh. All that for what?

Maybe I missed it. But I tried. And I love, love, loved Zadie Smith's White Teeth -- another novel that was a bit too long, according to Smith.
This was a slog.

1 out of 5 stars

The Most Photographed Barn January 29, 2008
31 out of 52 found this review helpful

I couldn't disagree more with the reviewer who said the hype is deserved. Delillo fans will appreciate the barn reference - why is everyone taking pictures of that barn? What's so special about it? Well, it's the world's most photographed barn -so we better take a picture of it! :)

Put simply, this book is not an easy read (which in and of itself isn't a problem, Invisible Man wasn't an easy read, but was well worth the effort). The time period is unclear - is this book showing an '80's punk scene or present day? I'm not sure when the story takes place and that was a problem for me. Despite it's sprawling 400+ pages, this book is a narrow view of Las Vegas in that there are no non-white characters. In a city as starkly diverse as Las Vegas, this narrow focus rang very false to me. Long, meandering sections seem to be more for the author then anyone else and coupled with the lack of a story structure makes this very hard to follow. Yes, we want to know why Newell is missing, but long stretches go by where Newell isn't in the story and then pops back in with strange factual references to the number of kids that go missing each year. I guess most importantly for me is that this book didn't leave me feeling anything. It's clear that the author is trying to create a big, sprawling epic but instead I felt that the novel was a disjointed combination of sequences, as though everything, including the kitchen sink was thrown in.

5 out of 5 stars

A BEAUTIFUL BEAST OF A NOVEL February 1, 2008
24 out of 39 found this review helpful

I came to Beautiful Children in between reading two Cormac McCarthy novels, Blood Meridian and The Road. And while Bock [full disclosure: I know him] and McCarthy are as different as two writers can be, they have this in common: Their characters inhabit an America that devours its children. In fact, Bock's Vegas occupies a sort of halfway point in the timeline between Blood Meridian's bloody Old West and the post-Apocalyptic ruin of The Road. And there are moments in Beautiful Children that are so vividly described as to seem not written, but filmed and transmitted directly to the brain. Beautiful Children isn't beach reading, and it won't make you want to hop on a plane to Vegas, but it's a terrific book.

1 out of 5 stars

Dickensian attempt but Seriously Flawed January 31, 2008
23 out of 44 found this review helpful

One hates to be too harsh with any debut novelist - especially one who so clearly has attempted to paint a broad sweeping picture of a wide-ranging group of characters in Las Vegas - but this book is so long and unfocused that it is at times unreadable.

I found myself drifting off as I read this novel - and having finished it, there is little that has stuck with me. Because there is so little plot, story arc or tension, it is hard to engage this book.

Another problem is that this is a narrow depiction of present-day Las Vegas. How is it that Newell and Kenny, two central characters, see "a Latino" as they are driving? I lived in Vegas for a short period of time and this whitewashed portrait is completely divorced from the reality of the city. Another nit, kids are making mix tapes (?) -- do kids today even know what a mix tape is?

Also, in a scene where the mother finds out her child is missing, the husband, "could hear the voices coming from the phone. The violent shouting. For the rest of his days, he would remember Lorraine's expression. The moment when life as he knew it ended." But how do you "find out" your child is missing? What sort of phone call do you receive? Surely some additional research could have resulted in a more accurate depiction of what it might be like to have a missing child. I found myself wishing thoroughout that the author had taken a more rigorous approach to both his research and his novel writing.

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