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About This Book
ISBN13: 9781400066506 
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Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)
"Like Don DeLillo, his influential predecessor in chronicling contemporary fear, Bock sounds an alarm: something is wrong in America, his novel tells us, when we allow the current conditions to exist unchallenged and unchecked. Exquisitely attuned to what is most destabilizing in our culture, he has his finger on those veins of anxiety that start deep within the individual and flow outward to create a giant societal web of unease. But while DeLillo's characters have always been stick figures frozen into various gestures of anomie, Bock animates the flamboyant structure of his novel with a dark, pulsating heart, juggling with admirable facility the contrapuntal voices and stories of more than half a dozen major characters. With its famous facsimiles of New York and Egypt and Polynesia, Las Vegas may be a giant deception in the desert, but Charles Bock is the real thing." Ruth Franklin, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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.
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About the Author
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
-
Tom Badyna, March 6, 2008 (view all comments by Tom Badyna)
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.
-
Sarah E Rose, February 7, 2008 (view all comments by Sarah E Rose)
This got an insane amount of press, and was touted as "the most anticipated debut novel," so I was pretty curious about how it would live up to the promises made by publicity. I'm happy to say that it's worth it; the prose is amazing. It's very affecting, heart-wrenching, but in the best way possible.
View all 2 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781400066506
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Random House
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Boys
- Subject:
- Deserts
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Publication Date:
- January 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 417
- Dimensions:
- 9.54x6.46x1.45 in. 1.54 lbs.
