In Charles Bock's debut
novel, Beautiful Children, Las Vegas is a point of arrival for runaways,
hustlers, addicts, would-be porn stars, strippers, comic-book artists, and regular
tax-paying hotel employees trying to raise a family. The city's neon pollutes
the night sky with an unnatural glow, exposing real people trying to live real
lives in a place that peddles false hope.
Children's story mostly concerns
the disappearance of 12-year-old Newell Ewing, a bratty, foul-mouthed lover of
UNLV basketball, comics, and hip-hop slang. The book's crowded cast includes
Bing Beiderbixxe, an underground, overweight comics artist who mingles with a
stripper named Cheri Blossom, whose claim to limited fame is that she can light
her nipples on fire. Then there's a drifter named Lestat, an Anne Rice devotee
who mostly roams the scenery with the pregnant, homeless Daphney. When Daphney
isn't taking swigs of cough medicine for the buzz, she likes to subject her new
friend, simply known as "the girl with the shaved head," to reattaching her
labial piercings, which come undone as her pregnancy progresses. Meanwhile,
Ponyboy, Cheri's boyfriend, bounces between schemes (porn-related, mostly),
trying to make ends meet. And Kenny, Newell's older friend, an aspiring comics
artist, is pale and awkward enough to choose to hang out with a 12-year-old.
Grounding this cast of
caricatures are Newell's parents, Lorraine and Lincoln, whose unlikely Vegas
domesticity comes unraveled as the months pass by with no sign of their son.
Their grief is a reminder that the rest of the book's "children"—pierced,
tattooed, drunk, and blindly reckless—were indeed once beautiful.
Regardless of whether the city has failed them, the ideas it was built on
certainly have.
Bock fills long, Don
DeLillo-like passages with deep-delving poetic cadences, and he elevates the
city's seediness with the kind of careful eye Robert Stone brought to New
Orleans in A Hall Of Mirrors. Passages about the intricacies of pornography
are too long, especially while Bock leaves his readers worrying about Newell's
fate. But the extreme hopelessness plaguing almost everyone in Beautiful
Children
is so taxing that it makes compassion difficult. Maybe that's the point: In Las
Vegas, the natives don't want sympathy; they just want better luck.