Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

[ariesallover]

Just saw this in NYT. I left the link to the first chapter - hope it works. It's going on my to-read list, partially because I think there's a great cheesiness in the language ("trying to eat the world" rocks!) and the topic; I think the author is aware of it, of course, and is in on the joke but also presenting it earnestly. I'm getting all kinds of fascinated with anything related to Vegas and Nevada. I go through phases like that.

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By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: February 3, 2008


Charles Bock, the son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers, spent much of his childhood behind the counter of his parents’ shop, staring out at desperate adults as they hocked their most precious possessions in hopes of restoring their luck. “From the back of the store,” he recalls on his Web site, “I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It’s impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved — to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone.”


First Chapter: ‘Beautiful Children’ (February 3, 2008) What Happened in Vegas Stayed in Vegas His Novel (January 27, 2008)




Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Charles Bock








After he left town, ending up on the East Coast for an M.F.A., Bock retained his searing memories. Now in his late 30s, he has spent a decade transforming them into his first novel, “Beautiful Children.” In it, he brings together the intersecting lives and innermost thoughts of parents and adolescents, strippers and pornographers, runaways and addicts, gamblers and comic-book illustrators, setting them against the neon-lit, heat-parched backdrop of Nevada, where “high walls and gated communities” join together in the night, “shimmering as if they were the surface of a translucent ocean,” and the colored towers of the Vegas Strip resemble a “distant row of glowing toys.” What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo.


Like a whirling roulette wheel, “Beautiful Children” presents a mesmerizing blur. Imagine each vivid slash of color as a character, with his or her own impetus toward loss and stubborn striving. Bock slows or stops the wheel at will, bringing each slot into saturated individual focus: “The lens zooms in, then draws back.” There are far too many to describe in detail — a grieving salesman, cold-shouldered by his wife, consoling himself with porn at the office; a slender nameless teenager known only as “the girl with the shaved head,” who has a near-terminal case of attitude and seeks perilous thrills at a desert rock concert; a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies; a midget convenience-store clerk; a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips. So let’s fix on just one: Ponyboy, a buff, tattooed, opportunistic wastrel, salivated over by drugged teenage girls as “Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful,” and leered at by an obese porn distributor nicknamed Jabba the Hutt.


At the age of 20, Ponyboy pictures himself as a “pimped out Jedi” knight with a “kung fu grip” as he delivers X-rated videos to porn shops by mountain bike. He revels in the whine of the tattooer’s drill each time he gets new ink: “Electricity lit up Ponyboy’s skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravangza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy’s nostrils.”
Bock’s evocation of experiences most people will (mercifully) never share, and his depiction of each man, woman and child’s personal mythology is ravishing and raw. Each time he sets the wheel spinning, the mind races, tracking memories of distinct images amid the whir. As in a casino, all sense of time — and of day or night — disappears, as we wait to see where the ball will land.


The story revolves around the disappearance of a surly 12-year-old on a hot Nevada night. The boy, Newell, is the son of Lorraine Ewing, a prudish former showgirl, and her husband, Lincoln, a casino sales rep who gave up his dream of playing with the Dodgers when the “halfhearted low fives” of his teammates showed him he would never cut it: “Lincoln had the curse of being good enough to see just how much better he needed to be.” Trapped in his “own personal cage,” he lacks the will to rein in his son’s rebellion.



“You hit a certain point in your life, fact is, you clemently rejoice in your son’s truancy, you actually want your child out on the town, disobeying orders, breaking his curfew,” Lincoln tells himself. “Tasting his first beer. Chasing a good time. Trying to eat the world.” Sometimes, Lincoln rationalizes, in order to bond with a child, you have to let him go. But what if your child goes and, like thousands of American kids each year, doesn’t come back? What if, many months later, the last proof you have of his existence is a washed-out image of a “slouching, unexpressive child,” Photoshopped and “circulated in e-mail attachments, faxes and flyers,” tacked up in “arcades and student unions and youth hostels; in post offices and convenience stores and drop-in centers for the homeless and indigent,” his age eventually replaced by his date of birth because “nobody can say how long a child will be missing.”


Newell’s mother torments herself, endlessly revisiting her son’s room, wondering what clues she missed: “How were you supposed to know? A 12-year-old boy is attracted to darkness. To special effects and sarcasm. Saying no when any idiot could see the answer was yes. If every boy with a short attention span and a propensity for smart remarks abandoned his life, who would be left?”


Newell vanishes on a Saturday night during a sullen joyride with his greasy-haired teenage outcast friend, Kenny, whom he bullies and patronizes. As Kenny drives, Newell cracks open the window, looking for passersby to blast with a stolen fire extinguisher and thinking of all the things he wants to be when he grows up: “jet-setting billionaire secret agent with a heart of stone; superhero who sneaks around in darkness and comes up behind terrorists and slits their throats; international jewel thief on a Harley with mounted laser guns.”


Children don’t understand the reality of the future. “Adulthood,” Bock writes, “with all its responsibilities and implications, is as impenetrable to a child as Martian trigonometry. That is one of the beauties of youth. And it is why someone has to be there, vigilant.” The fact that adults can’t always be vigilant — can’t anticipate the moment when the kid they’re trying not to alienate will make the awful, wrong decision — is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this splendid, disturbing novel. As Bock also shows, adults can’t even protect themselves from awful, wrong decisions.


Early in the novel, Newell, Kenny and Beiderbixxe, the cartoonist, meet at a Saturday talk in a comics store called Amazin’ Stories, where Beiderbixxe has come to discuss his illustrated series, “Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut.” Newell isn’t impressed. Too young and undereducated to pick up on Beiderbixxe’s ironies, he’s bored. “Honestly, it wasn’t exactly easy to get jazzed about Bing Beiderbixxe,” he thinks, puffed up with preteen scorn.

“From the looks of things, Newell wasn’t alone in this opinion. The store was largely empty, just a few underclassman types solemnly wandering the new arrivals racks, and three or four guys standing a respectful distance from the autograph table, nodding and listening, but seeming unconvinced.”
Reading that scene, I remembered the time, last fall, when I unwittingly stumbled on Charles Bock, reading from this book at a now-defunct club called Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction. Bock had chosen a selection about the girl with the shaved head and the attitude, and as he spoke, transmitting her self-consciousness, slick with the clichés that are as much a part of a teenage girl’s wardrobe as lip gloss, I couldn’t anticipate the art that lay behind the larger work. I pouted like Newell, didn’t get it. Coming across the scene again in the novel, I sheepishly saw that its “limitations” were only the natural ones of a girl who could be no wiser, at 15 or 16, than she was.


In “Beautiful Children,” Bock’s vision and voice create a fictional landscape as corruptly compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival — illustrating what he calls “the nobility inherent in struggles that cannot be won.”

[birdmadgirl]

I'm going to go hear him speak later this week at a library here in Vegas. The book has received some good reviews--I need to pick it up.

[ariesallover]

I'll be curious for your impressions, especially how he comes across in person.

[birdmadgirl]

I missed seeing him at the library. I did want to share this, though--his book is available for free download for the next few days through Random House.

http://www.beautifulchildren.net/read/