Beautiful Children: A Novel
by Charles Bock
List Price:
Our Price: $3.78
You Save: $21.22 (85%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.13 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Charles BockEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-01-22
ISBN: 1400066506
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of Beautiful Children: A Novel
Book Review: Numbness
Summary: 1 Stars
Charles Bock can write. The occasional sentence flashes from the muck. Like this one: "Air glittered with nicotine and conversation."
The sentences that follow that one aren't bad, either:
"It dripped with hope and desperation and designer perfumes. Through the vague and blinking distance, Keno ballasts flushed, the digital figures of progressive slot jackpot reader boards were in perpetual motion, the waterfall of coins into metal buckets was resonant, continuous, an orchestral hymn."
There were a few moments like that one. Key word: few. Bock can do a few sentences, I'm not so sure about a whole book. I read it all in a state of disbelief, really, that this had reached publication, like every agent and editor and publisher had vacated New York for the month of decision-making around this manuscript, like "I Am Legend" but only for the literary set. How did this get through?
By that, I'm wondering this: what's the redeeming value? I kept waiting, hoping. I liked the way the characters started to bump into each other and intersect. But to what end? Why the pages and pages that go nowhere? Why all the trite lines, like when Lincoln comes to terms with his own mortality? Or Lorraine trying to understand why her son has run away. Big insight: the "flight from home" is "most often an act of self-declaration."
The Pony Boy and Cherry sections were tedious. Pony Boy to Cherry, encouraging her to join his schemes: "We do this right, we'll be living the high life." Ever heard that before? Do you think a character later described as "an indestructible mutant cockroach" would actually think such a thought, let alone utter it?
Characters come and go in a blur. Not a blur, really. That would mean things move quickly and they do not. You read and keeping hoping, this will be the character to hang out with, to take you on a ride through the mayhem and depravity, this will be the one who will bring all other plot lines together. But, alas, no.
At one point near the end Lorraine is imagining the life of "grime and pain" for her missing son Newell and she can't come to grips with it. "There was," she decides, "only numbness, exhaustion."
Exactly.
Summary of Beautiful Children: A Novel
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 Wilsey
United States Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in United States Books
These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901by Nancy E. Turner
Wheeler Publishing; Published: 1999-06; Hardcover; Book
Price in other shops:
Paradiseby Judith McNaught
Thorndike Pr; Published: 1992-01; Hardcover; Book
Price in other shops:
Friends and Loversby Eric Jerome Dickey
Signet; Published: 1998-09-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.46
Price in other shops:
Boy's Lifeby Robert R. McCammon
MacMillan Publishing Company.; Published: 1992-02; Library Binding; Book
Price in other shops:
The Prophetby Kahlil Gibran
Penguin USA (P); Published: 1999-01; Paperback; Book
Price in other shops:
Same Kind Of Different As Meby Ron Hall, Denver Moore
Thomas Nelson; Published: 2006; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.30
Price in other shops:
Lonesome Doveby Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster; Published: 1985-06-13; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $40.00
Waiting in Vainby Colin Channer
One World/Ballantine; Published: 1998-06-23; Hardcover; Book
Price in other shops:
It's a Wonderful Lifeby James W. Rodgers, Frank Capra, Philip Van Doren Stern
Dramatic Pub Co; Published: 1994-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.50
Redeeming Loveby Francine Rivers
Multnomah Books; Published: 1997-05-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
His Illegal Self (Vintage International)by Peter Carey
Vintage; Published: 2009-02-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.14
Price in other shops:
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (Oprah Book Club #62)by David Wroblewski
Ecco; Published: 2008-09-19; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.35
Price in other shops:
The Delivery Man: A Novelby Joe McGinniss Jr.
Grove/Atlantic, Black Cat; Published: 2008-01-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.99
Price in other shops:
Then We Came to the End: A Novelby Joshua Ferris
Back Bay Books; Published: 2008-02-26; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.77
Price in other shops:
2666: A Novelby Roberto Bolano
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2008-11-11; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $18.74
Price in other shops:
The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)by Aravind Adiga
Free Press; Published: 2008-10-14; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.00
Price in other shops:
Unaccustomed Earth: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)by Jhumpa Lahiri
Vintage; Published: 2009-04-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.90
Price in other shops:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoby Junot D?az
Riverhead Trade; Published: 2008-09-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.24
Price in other shops:
Netherland (Vintage Contemporaries)by Joseph O'Neill
Vintage; Published: 2009-05-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.70
Price in other shops:
Lush Life: A Novelby Richard Price
Picador; Published: 2009-03-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.37
Price in other shops: