Beautiful Children

I had been keen on reading Charles Bock's novel Beautiful Children ever since I first knew about it for a couple of reasons. For one, it is set in Las Vegas, a city that endlessly fascinates me, and Bock grew up there. To hear the insights of a person who actually lives in that place is interesting to me, because I am also writing a book set in Sin City.

Secondly, his book is largely about what goes in the shadows of the city, the demimonde prowled by strippers, the porn industry, and street hustlers. The result is a curious hybrid, a lyrical novel full of the retches of humanity, a kind of vicarious look at a world that most people would run from, screaming.

The spine of the book is the night that a twelve-year old boy, Newell Ewing (I don't know where he got that name) goes out on the town with a slightly older friend, Kenny, a comic-book nerd, and disappears. Interspersed in this time frame and flash forwards and flashbacks concerning Newell and his parents, particularly their reaction to his disappearance. His mother, Lorraine, a former showgirl, channels her desperation into working for runaway child organizations, while his father, a former minor league ballplayer, struggles to keep his marriage together.

The ancillary characters provide Beautiful Children with much of its texture. There is Cheri Blossom, a stripper, and her boyfriend Ponyboy (certainly these names are references to S.E. Hinton's classic, The Outsiders), who works for a porno video distribution company. Ponyboy, who is one of these characters who is fully tattooed and pierced, has encouraged Cheri to get breast implants, and now pushes her to try the adult entertainment world, and her "audition" is a nightmarish scenario. However, from my understanding of how the adult film world works, I'm not sure it's very accurate. Also, this book came out in 2008, but all of the references to video cassettes are instantly obsolete.

Another character is Bing Beiderbixxe, a writer of underground comics. He's basically a loser, but to Kenny and Newell he's important because he writes comics. As we follow Bing through his lonely-guy visit to the strip club to get a private dance from Cheri, or his outings with fellows with whom he engages in Internet chats, there is a lot of sharp and funny descriptions of life with this type of guy.

Then there's Lestat and Daphney, two kids who live on the street. Daphney is pregnant, and Lestat left home to try to meet Ann Rice. There's a harrowing passage late in the book that documents the logistics of how Lestat manages on the street, and it's the kind of thing that any kid contemplating running away should read as a "scared straight" lesson.

The writing in this book is frequently soaring, but I'm not sure it all held together. There is no resolution to what happened to Newell, so it doesn't qualify as a mystery in the strictest sense. At times the prose also gets quite dense, and struggles to delineate a clear line. But Bock does create some vivid tapestries. I liked the areas where he clearly does have expertise, such as a pawnshop. He's also made a bold choice by making Newell, the missing child, as thoroughly obnoxious as any child I've come across in recent fiction.

As someone writing about Las Vegas, I need to read these books so I don't inadvertently copy any metaphors. There are two common things that come up in any books about Vegas--the heat: "A hundred and five outside for the ninety-ninth straight day. That dry desert heat, a wall that hit the moment you stepped outside, then pounded relentlessly;" and the lights: "The neon. The halogen. The viscous liquid light. Thousands of millions of watts, flowing through the letters of looping cursive and semi-cursive, filling then emptying, then starting over again. Waves of electricity, emanating from pop art facades, actually transforming the nature of the atmosphere, creating a mutation of night, a night that is not night--daytime at night. The twenty-four-hour bacchanal. The party without limits. The crown jewel of a country that has institutionalized indulgence. Vegas on Saturday night."