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Tom Badyna, March 6, 2008

I don’t pick up a new book but wanting to say “Five Stars,” and wave it about, “Our book, our culture.” I’m tired of feeling embarrassed for our newbie writers when compared to their European and South American counterparts. But the best I can say for Beautiful Children is it’s a tour de force of puerility. I read it and couldn’t but think that Mr. Bock is as absorbed as his characters in the culture of the video games, pornography, comic books and the screaming, screeching music described in this book. To think that a thirty-eight year old man had written this creeped me out, pure and simple. It didn’t even read like an act of pedophilic voyeurism, which might be to Mr. Bock’s moral credit, though not his literary one. The book has no heart, no vision, no ethos, no esthetic, nothing but a kind of cheap, copped morbidity – the stuff of a puberty stretching on interminably.

If this book were handed to me as a manuscript, I’d hand it back with mild pleasantries like “Okay – you’ve done the research ad nauseum, shown that you can imagine the second-by-second thoughts of an insipid character moving through a pointless minute of an inconsequential life, now tell a story, and, if it comes to you, toss in maybe one or two redeeming minutes.” If I were feeling charitable, I might add, “Just as you seem to confuse dirty underwear for grit and truthtelling, you also confuse bad grammar for literary style.”

Mr. Bock, no doubt about it, has an aversion to direct, Anglo-Saxon verbs, which, in this book, are outnumbered by nouns by a thousand to one. Also, and worse, he loads sentence after sentence with strings of descriptive clauses, most of them beginning with a present participle. I counted one stretch where twelve consecutive sentences were of such construction. It all gives the narrative the urgency of a slow doggie-paddle in a cesspool.

The book says nothing, is little more than faux nihilism sans courage, supported by presumptions of sap.

Our critics, our editors, our agents, have lost their freaking minds.

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