Beautiful Children: A Novel | Charles Bock

Beautiful Children: A Novel | Charles Bock | Good - Too Long - Now Write Me the Colossal Book That Is In You

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Beautiful Children...

	Beautiful Children: A Novel Charles Bock Random House, 2008 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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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

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decent

somewhat disappointing after all the media attention this book received. can just picture Bock sitting in his dark little apartment, relishing his every sentence. not that there's anything wrong with that...but the writing seems too self-conscious. reminds me of a cheesy film noir. the theme that ties it all together is poorly and over-done. not even really that good a picture of las vegas.

Good - Too Long - Now Write Me the Colossal Book That Is In You

This was a pretty good book. Mr. Bock. You entertained me. I found the switching around. The intertwining of the stories. The various characters were interesting and developed in non-standard ways. As a person who has little sympathy for the homeless, you managed to tweak *my* heart strings. That's no small feat.

OK a little constructive criticism because I would like you to write me a better book. You have a colossal book in you and I am waiting for it.

Read "The Road." Go for THAT kind of brevity. Every thing you write, ask: "does it add something?" There was a lot of stuff in there that actually DETRACTED, because you had made your point. We understood that about the person, scene or mood, and you said it perfectly the *first* time. So this would have been better at 250 pages not 400. Use your skill >>> paint the picture in as few a words as possible. An abstract.

Second. Wow me at the end. Boy runs into desert, girl gets into car, porn star stays with sleeazer boyfriend, and fat nerd drives home just did not do it for me. I mean, I GET the hopelessness of life, but you can still get that across and bang me over the head at the end. Try irony or something. I dunno ... the Dad sleeps with the porn star, or the fat nerd hits the FBI Mobile head on and they all die in a big ball of flames. Something.

So a good try, I don't mean to discourage you. I think you have a talent. But I should not be skimming the last 50 pages to get to the end, because you wasted my time because you did not do the work to trim it down. You left the arms on the "venus walking." Now: go try again I am waiting.

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