Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"This powerful indictment of a culture of 'people hurting people for no reason' promises to shake up the moral conscience of every reader. A comprehensive drama; highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"This debut shows plenty of ambition and promise but could use a streamlining of subplots....On some level, everyone is a predator, and any beauty that these children once had has been either taken from them or bartered." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassionand 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
Review
"Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart." Jonathan Safran Foer
Review
"Beautiful Children is 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
Review
"Bock's characters are well drawn, he works to tie his plot threads together, and he clearly cares about runaways...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." Booklist
Review
"The story, rendered beautifully, even heartbreakingly, plays out at top speed, blocked only by a chunk of chat-room text and a few other odd snippets. Yet the doom enveloping Newell is so palpable it almost suffocates the reader, too. (Grade: B)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Beautiful Children has no real built-in trajectory....This book's structure is so slack that it seems like a string of overlapping individual sketches, some much better than others." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"Beautiful Children is not an easy read, nor is it a polished work....And yet this novel deserves to be read more than once because of the extraordinary importance of its subject matter and the sensitivity with which he treats it." John Burdett, The Washington Post Book World
Review
"[I]n the end I feel that too much in Beautiful Children is told rather than shown, that the repetitions slow down the story, and that the novel could have been shaped into something more compelling. Even when Bock begins to dig deeper, he seems to lose his nerve. That is a shame, because he has real talent and insight." The Boston Globe
Review
"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)
About the Author
Charles Bock was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. He has an MFA from Bennington College and has received fellowships from Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in New York City. Visit the author's website at www.beautifulchildren.net.
Charles Bock on PowellsBooks.Blog
My new novel,
Alice and Oliver, is loosely based on the first year of my late wife Diana Colbert’s battle with leukemia, a disease she was diagnosed with when our infant daughter was six months old. As you might suspect from that lead-in, it is a book about love and generosity and the conflict between what we owe ourselves and what we owe others...
Read More»