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    Beautiful Children: A Novel
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    Beautiful Children: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Children: A Novel
    Ebook542 pages8 hours

    Beautiful Children: A Novel

    By Charles Bock

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The New York Times bestseller by the author of the forthcoming novel Alice & Oliver | Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters | A New York Times Notable Book
     
    “One word: bravo.”—The New York Times Book Review
     
    “Truly powerful . . . Beautiful Children dazzles its readers on almost every page. . . . [Charles Bock] knows how to tug at your heart, and he knows how to make you laugh out loud, often on the same page, sometimes in the same sentence.”—Newsweek

    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.

    Praise for Beautiful Children
     
    “Exceptional . . . This novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter.”—The Washington Post Book World
     
    “Magnificent . . . a hugely ambitious novel that succeeds . . . Beautiful Children manages to feel completely of its moment while remaining unaffected by literary trends. . . . Charles Bock is the real thing.”—The New Republic
     
    “A wildly satisfying and disturbing literary journey, led by an author of blazing talent.”—The Dallas Morning News
     
    “Wholly original—dirty, fast, and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl.”—Esquire
     
    “An anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity . . . The language has a rhythm wholly its own—at moments it is stunning, near genius.”—A. M. Homes
     
    “From start to finish, Bock never stops tantalizing the reader.”—San Francisco Chronicle
     
    “Rich and compelling . . . captures the hallucinogenic setting like a fever dream.”—Los Angeles Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 22, 2008
    ISBN9781588366832
    Unavailable
    Beautiful Children: A Novel

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    Reviews for Beautiful Children

    3/5

    158 ratings20 reviews

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    • 2/5
      A book about missing kids appealed to me because I know people who took that path. I related to the kids who made bad choices and then just kind of gave up their dreams and rolled with what came their way.

      There are shocking looks at the Vegas underground- strip joints and the amateur porn scam. There are the parents of a missing boy who can't figure out how to make their lives work again.

      Overall, I was disappointed in the lack of direction and follow through with the characters.

      Although this was an interesting book, ultimately it's just depressing with no upside and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone I can think of.
    • 2/5
      I don't know how to review this book. I was not expecting to dislike every character, even the missing kid, Newell. I hated that I liked him least of all. The premise of the story is twelve year old Newell goes missing on the streets of Las Vegas. Vegas gives Bock a huge canvas to work with. Think about it: the seedy and spectacular people, the gritty and shiny atmosphere, the ever-lurking potential for danger around every corner. It's Sin City, after all! Bock does take advantage of the expanse of his canvas but not in a good way. It's almost like he had too much space so he overfilled it with garbage. Story lines are jumbled and discombobulated. Like marbles scattering in a hallway, Bock careens from one time and place to another. Yes, there are criminals, strippers, homeless kids, drug addicts, pawnshop owners, gamblers, sex addicts, comic book illustrators, beggars, liars, thieves...all of them sad and pitiful. The center of this story is supposed to be focused on a missing kid. Yes, the parents are grief stricken and the marriage suffers, but not enough attention is paid to the here and now of that intense drama. Instead, Bock delves into what intense sadness does to to a sex life. There are no FBI agents anxiously hovering over wire-tapped telephones while hand wringing, pale faced parents look on. There are no episodes of pounding the streets, littering them with Have You Seen Me? fliers. Instead, Bock focuses on the worldMaybe it's because I listened to this on audio. Maybe it's because the sex scenes were practically pornographic. Maybe it's because the story couldn't stay linear for two minutes. Maybe it's because I couldn't find a character to love or even like. I suspect, if I look for the truth closer to home, I didn't like Beautiful Children because, for all of his over the top, down and dirty descriptions of Las Vegas, when it came right down to it, he was describing my cousin's last home. My cousin could have been that homeless kid on page 122.
    • 2/5
      This book got a lot of great buzz when it came out, but I'm afraid to say I just didn't understand why. Perhaps it was because I was expecting something much different. This book is raw--very raw--just this side of pornography in some places. Much of the talk of sex felt gratuitous to me. The book is really a collection of stories that switch back and forth, some interspersing with others but they do not necessarily all tie in together. It does draw the reader along, it does paint a very vivid picture of the underbelly of Las Vegas and the reader cannot help but feel sorry for almost all of the characters. I cannot think of a single person I would recomment it to, though.
    • 1/5
      Beautiful Children is the debut novel of Charles Bock. The story goes back and forth between one night and in Vegas and another time in the future. Twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes missing and we follow him on a night out on the town with an awkward older friend, aspiring comic book artist Kenny. We also follow the dissolution of his parents' marriage in the aftermath of Newell's disappearance, and the parallel lives of several young street people in Vegas.Everything is supposed to converge at the end and tie together, but I didn't get that far.The combination of the writing and the narration made this one difficult to concentrate on. The story was filled with graphic sex and was supposed to show the underbelly of Vegas for child runaways, but it was so uninteresting. Bock did a good job of making Vegas sound boring. Even his supposedly weird and freakish characters weren't compelling.I only made it halfway through the book before I gave up.
    • 2/5
      I picked up this book because there was a recommendation on the back from Jonathan Safran Foer that actually used to word epic. Well, this book was an epic disappointment for me, especially considering I value Foer's opinion and have found his novels to be much more profound than this effort. It makes me think Foer must be a friend of Bock and wanted to be positive but still, now I'm never going to trust a novel he recommends again.

      I think if you're really curious about depravity and want to know about the seedy underground of Las Vegas pornography, gambling, illegal weapon sales, and runaways (all the way from the 12 year old with ADHD and a weakness for sugar to the pregnant druggie runaways), then this is your novel. If you already realized all this existed and this novel isn't telling you anything new, you're not really going to feel enlightened or like you learned anything by reading it. The book has some minor insights as it keeps switching from the stripper and her boyfriend to the dropouts and runaway kids to the parent of the 12 yr. old who has run away from home but overall I just didn't feel it was worth reading it's 400 pages. I kept thinking the end would justify the means and that at the conclusion of the novel, I'd come away with a hint of the epic and exacting heart of it that Foer spoke of. Though the ending could have been much more of a colossal disappointment, I still felt a little like I'd wasted my time. If a book isn't going to be any kind of revelation, at the very least it should be short after all so I can get to the next novel that I might find more fulfilling much faster.

      Also, I found the book to be quite racist in places...and I have to say, I think Bock himself was more trying to capture the essence of the spirit on the street but it still really offended me. Again, end didn't justify the means.


      Anyhow, I digress..on a positive note, here are some quotes.

      pg. 103 "Blokes who went out of their way to use the word bloke, calling each other at outrageous hours of the night and filling the dead air with whispers, who traded personalized mix tapes culled from hidden tracks on their favorite compact discs, delighted in the fact that the cassette tape was an ancient and disappearing species, and made sure to take special time and effort in their hunts through vintage shops for the forgotten postcard that would have a special, though not overt, significance to the receiver of the tape, thereby serving as the tape's perfect piece of cover art."


      pg. 105 "The conspiracy of human frailty was the phrase her mother used. And this usually seemed to have an effect on the girl. Like some magic elixir had been released, the tension would break, the two would embrace..."

      pg 337 "The sane sober businessman does not walk down the street talking out loud to himself but the crazy homeless man does. And this, Lestat understood, was one of the fundamental differences between the two. Over time Lestat had also grown to understand how the former becomes the latter. How all your thoughts and frustrations can inch closer and closer toward on uninterrupted rant. How the chasm between a person and the world around him can grow, a shell forming between the life you once had and the life you are leaving."

      pg. 388 "A twelve year old is attracted to darkness. To special effects and sarcasm..."

      pg. 407 "Each and every one of us moves toward fates we cannot possibly know. Each of us struggles against the pain of the world, even as we are doomed to join in."
    • 4/5
      Mostly liked it, although it struck me as very young, and not just because of the subject matter. The hardest part for me to get around was his trying to cram too much stuff in there, pushing his fascination with his characters before the reader has a chance to develop their own. When he pulls back, holds onto information and goes for a little less-is-more, it's usually really effective. So I guess my beef would be with the lack of variety where his pacing is concerned -- I think that could push it over into being a great book. On the other hand, he sustains his pitch through the whole novel, and that's something. It's ambitious, and it's very earnest, and I like that he didn't succumb to the temptation to write edgy just because his subject matter is.I really hate the designation of "freshman novel" -- it's so condescending -- but in this case I don't think it's such a bad thing. There's a whole lot here to like, and I'd be really interested to see what he comes out with in the future.
    • 5/5
      Not for the faint of heart. This New York Times Notable Book reads like the movies "Babel" or "Crash" unfold: a number of linking stories told on one day in Las Vegas, the day a 12-year-old boy from what appears to be a normal middle-class family disappears. But the book shows all levels of society, from porn peddlers and throwaway teenagers to a bad marriage unravelling. A downer but very powerful.
    • 4/5
      outstanding book really good story!
    • 3/5
      Have you ever watched the movie Happiness? It's a brilliant film, but one that I'm always reluctant to recommend because it is so unclean. Seriously. You kinda wanna take a shower after viewing it and wash away the emotional cringe factor of humanity.That's how I feel about Beautiful Children. I read it a couple of weeks go and couldn't decide how to review it, so I put it aside until something came to me. Well, weeks later, and still nothing. Nothing outside that unsettled feeling of devastation.Despair. That's how I would define this novel. And it's beautifully done. It leaves a feeling of despair.There are several lives that intersect in the hellish city of Las Vegas: a nerdy comic lovin' adolescent who has no friend (except), an awkward teenage artist who draws comics, a comic book illustrator who seems to have a problem with emotional connection and relies on lots of sex to counteract that, a stripper who plans on getting out (don't they all?), the stripper's boyfriend who is a dirty criminal (shocking, of course), and then a slew of homeless kids that come in and out of scenes.The story begins with Newell, the nerdy kid whose only friend is the awkward teenage artist, and I suppose you could say that he is the impetus of the novel for he goes missing. That's how the story opens; Newell is gone. The chapters are told in segments of time all leading up to the missing child. And everything else is a smorgasbord of what happens in Vegas in a night.Can I just tell you that there really aren't any likable characters? The closest would be Newell's parents, but that's mainly because they come across utterly wounded at the loss of their only child. How it affects their relationship with one and another and how each of them grieves are so real that I cannot help but feel pity for them.The author does a wonderful job at exploring street life for teens and for strippers. I might not have *liked* the characters but I felt they were real.If you are in a good place in your life then I would read this book. If you're already depressed with the world, move on please.
    • 3/5
      Very much enjoyed the writing and the tone. Found the whole package very depressing and dark and would recommend very selectively. A horrid 12-year-old boy goes missing. I came around to having a tiny bit of feeling for this kid, but only for a moment or two. The other lives intertwined in the story are mostly pathetic and only somewhat sympathetic. There's the mom and dad; former failed baseball player, and mom; a beauty. Ponyboy; sad mohawked ,pierced, hustler runaway and boyfriend of Cheri Blossom; breast-implanted stripper. Bing Beiderbixxe low tier comic book artist. Kenny, friend of Newell (the boy who goes missing), he's 20ish and a wanna be artist with a sad life and not a scrap of confidence. I can't go on. The way it's written and constructed is pretty great, just the subject was too much for me.
    • 4/5
      Bock's novel, Beautiful Children, is an unapologetic look at the dirty aspects of life and Las Vegas. This wonderfully researched book is raw and jagged at times. The back cover may make it sound like it could maybe be a romance novel, but it's anything but. It's more about people being torn apart than coming together.The book centers around Newell, a missing child. However, many other plot lines intersect his. The story is crafted in a style reminiscent of the movies Love Actually and Crash, with all of the many characters linked, however loosely. One of the real marvels of this work is that all of the characters whose stories we follow are beautifully developed. I never felt like any were being ignored. They're all fleshed out and grow throughout the story. We learn about them, and they are alive in the pages of the book.All of the characters have some hard-to-address aspect of their lives. Something about them that makes us uncomfortable on some level, at least according to social norms. A stripper who repeatedly sacrifices her dignity, a boy who thinks his girlfriend could be a porn star, parents who are grieving and torn apart over the disappearance of their child, a friend who crosses an unspeakable line. Bock is unafraid to delve into the harsh realities of strippers, runaways, and those in the porn industry. Sex plays a role in many of the storylines, but it falls short of being obscene.Bock's writing itself is phenomenal. The detail he portrays in each and every paragraph is hard to come by in a novel. It's vivid and alive, and only emphasizes the jagged edges of life. Despite it's incredible descriptiveness, he manages to keep his writing tasteful, no matter how coarse the subject matter. He's descriptive, but not overly graphic.I felt dragged into this story. I was invested in all of the characters. Whenever the plot turned to one, I was simultaneously drawn to that character and wondering what was happening to the others. Bock's final accomplishment is in what he didn't write. He knew just what to leave out to make his story continue to resonate, even after the last page was turned.
    • 1/5
      I think it's reprehensible to rate a book without finishing it, so I'll leave that to others who suffered all the way through to the bitter end of this terrible book. I'm throwing in the towel after reading about 1/4 of its pages filled with contrived, unconvincing dialogue and meager character development. No rating, but you can assume that it's less than one.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book. The topic was pretty straightforward: a son goes missing from his middle-class family in Las Vegas. But the book was at times intense and disturbing (both in good ways). I loved the characters; they were flawed humans who I found to be very believable. I would read anything by this author.
    • 4/5
      This story of life on the streets, and on the underside, of Las Vegas was one that I found just okay at the beginning, but came to like more and more as I got deeper into the book. For those of you who have started and given up, try picking the book up again...I think you'll be glad you did.The central plot of this book is the story of 12 year old Newell, who runs away from an affluent home, what happens to him on the night he disappeared, and how his parents are coping (or not) with the loss of their only child. It's also the story of a collection of other characters -- Cheri Blossom, the stripper who loves her boyfriend Ponyboy despite his obvious faults; Bing, the graphic artist and writer; Kenny the misfit teenager; the girl with the shaved head; "Danger Prone" Daphney and her "vampire" guardian. All the interwoven stories come together to form a picture of what happens when your life doesn't follow the normal pattern -- when you need to escape your situation or yourself. The young people living on the streets, the people making and viewing pornography, the upper middle class parents whose lives are shattered by the loss of a child, the hyperactive kid. And, I'll be honest, it was partly voyeurism that drew me into this story of life on the edge. But it was also that all of us, at one time or another, feels or fears that we don't fit the normal pattern.The writing is solid, and there is the right balance for my taste between plot and character development. I feel I know some of the characters extremely well; others remain more of a mystery. That's life. And, while the interwoven stories come together to some extent, the author has resisted any temptation to bring every sub-plot to a full, clear resolution. Again, that's life.I think Mr. Bock has a lot of potential, and I will definitely look for his next novel.
    • 4/5
      Let me start out by saying, this is an author to watch! [Beautiful Children] is his debut and it shows a lot of promise. Much like Price's [Lush Life], the premise of the story is a simple one and in this story a child is missing from an affluent Las Vegas family and from here Bock builds a nightmarish world of runaways, strippers, grieving parents and a mix of other fringe-dwellers, some simply repellent. This is not an easy read, of course the subject matter is very disturbing but the author crams in to much detail at times and he could have used a bit more editing. There seems to be mixed feelings on this book, according to the reviews, but I've come out on the positive side and recommend it! I feel he may be a literary voice for the future!
    • 3/5
      Nearing the end of Charles Bock’s ten-year-in-the-making first novel Beautiful Children, would be graphic novelist Bing Beiderbixxe makes notes for the novel he’d like to write:When he couldn’t avoid it any longer, he opened a word processing file. Bing typed in a stream of consciousness, without bothering to read what he was entering, without correcting his errors, leaving alone phrases that he knew were false starts. It was more important to get it all out, get it down.…Bing made a column for each character, and in this way, slowly started shaping their traits, developing ideas for them. He had some thoughts about making the stories and lives and interests intersect, and typed these out as well, under a different heading.This is a novel I really did want to like. Reading Beiderbixxe’s plan, it’s not a leap to read into this Bock’s own early starting point and intentions. One has to wonder if, over the years, it just got away from him. If the intent to bring it all together just got overwhelming. This has all the earmarks of a novel whose writing stretches out over a period of a writer’s true maturation. In the end, I think he’s given us a series of character studies that of varying degrees of success.The grieving mother and ex-show girl Lorraine Ewing turns out to be the most successful of them all - and close behind her husband Lincoln. The ways in which they both deal with the disappearance of their 12-year old son Newell, the effect on their marriage, may border on cliche - but some cliches mirror the truth.The mix of street people, runaways, hustlers, strippers, pornographers, and comic book geeks all set down in the glitz of Las Vegas has the potential to shout out loud truths about 21st Century America. Someone may still write a great novel about our careening culture as played out in the naturally metaphorical setting of Las Vegas. Unfortunately, this misses the mark.
    • 2/5
      If you're interested in the underbelly of Las Vegas (runaway teens, strippers, the porn industry, drugs, etc), then this is your book. Sleazy happenings but lush, intense prose. Hard to read and probably could have used more editing, but well worth it.
    • 4/5
      The eclectic mix of characters in this gritty novel is only trumped by Bock's ability to make the players so real. I'm not usually a big fan of books that attempt to weave in several storylines. But "Beautiful Children" kept my interest right to the end. Some reviewers have described the author's style as choppy and uneven. I disagree. I think he effectively captured the internal chaos that faced many of the characters.
    • 1/5
      Gave up about 100 pages in. I found the writing style choppy and unusual. It started out with a teenage boy's disappearance. His parents have a rocky relationship. His parents appear to start to get along after his disappearance. That is as much as I got out of the pages I read.
    • 4/5
      Hard to read but riveting! I loved the way Bock writes and especially his way of making so many characters so real - it seemed like every character was well known by the author. At the end of the book I was disappointed that it was over and diappointed that the story was such a downer but positive and excited about Bock's second book!