Beautiful Children
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Average rating3
15
Ratings1
Average rating3
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.Advance praise for Beautiful Children"Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and 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"Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart."--Jonathan Safran Foer"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 WilseyFrom the Hardcover edition.
Reviews with the most likes.
Is it bad that my fave part of this book was the ridiculous sparkly font on the cover? Really, though, despite the ostentatious and fun-loving cover, I liked the book, too. I would place it in the category of “definitely a first novel,” for its faults, but it had strong points, too. Las Vegas figures as a character in this book–at times shimmering in the evening sun, at times grimy and dust-covered–which was one of the things I liked best. Bock covers the dissolution of a marriage the best, I think, and although all the character's narratives are skillfully woven together, you end up caring more about some than about others, and not intentionally on his part, I believe. Still, overall enjoyable, and interesting to read to compare to ALLLL the hype he's gotten.
