Beautiful Children - Hardcover

Bock, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719596203 ISBN 13: 9780719596209

Publisher: John Murray, 2008

Synopsis

One Saturday night, in a city surrounded by desert and oversaturated with glitter is Newell Ewing. With his older, socially maladjusted mate Kenny, the two embark on Newell's first Saturday night out on the town in Vegas. Newell is twelve years old. Before the sun rises Newell has disappeared, never to be seen again.

Newell's suburbanite parents, Lincoln and Lorraine, are racked with mounting grief as their marriage begins to unravel during the unfathomable year that follows his disappearance.

Bing Biderbixxe is an illustrator on a professional visit to Sin City on a hot summer day. He meets Cheri Blossom, a stripper known for her eye-popping pyrotechnic stage performance. Offstage, her drug- and porn-running boyfriend, Pony Boy, is cheating on her.

With exacting suspense and original technique, Bock's panoply of Vegas dispossessed quietly exert their influence on Newell's fate.

From the new suburban shimmer of the Ewing home, to the gaudy misery of Vegas strip clubs, to the desperate holes and punk-rock desert parties where an underclass of the marginal and meek are ignored and forgotten, Charles Bock takes us on a trip to the dark heart of America.

Beautiful Children mines the humanity of its characters as it rushes head on towards a spectacular tragedy and powerful redemption.

About this title

Review:

Ravishing and raw... What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo" and, as corruptly compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival (New York Times Book Review)

Has great energy and some lovely writing. Bears comparison to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels.

It shares with these books the sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic arrangements,
the excess of detail mirroring the way consumer materialism shapes the interpersonal
transactions of the middle-class American home, and a sense of elegy for how the
promise of the American Dream more often than not (at least in literature) seems to get lost.

(Sydney Morning Herald)

'It's wholly original - dirty, fast and hypnotic. The sentences flicker and skip and whirl, like the neon city Bock writes about. It will change the way you look at Las Vegas' (Esquire Magazine (US))

Rich and compelling (LA Times)

The brilliant sentence-on-sentence prose gives the book its power an impressive novel (The London Paper)

Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart. (Jonathan Safran Foer)

It is stunning, near genius. Beautiful Children is brutal, erotic and like a wild potentially dangerous ride--it could crash at any moment. The language has a rhythm wholly it's own--a nervous kind of be-bob. It is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment--a major new talent. (A. M. Homes)

Beautiful Children is a fucking mind-blower! It is so good practically every sentence shines. You've got a sensation on your hands. (Sean Wilsey, author of Oh The Glory Of It All)

Beautiful Children is one of the finest first novels I have ever read. Brilliant, simmering, erotic, this dark adventure takes the world apart and offers it to you, piece by heart-stopping piece. (Allison Smith, author of Name all the Animals)

Charles Bock takes us somewhere in Beautiful Children that most of us would be afraid to go alone: across the neon deserts of the new west and into an underworld that is the world. Follow him. This is a journey, and a novel, that allows us no turning back. (Walter Kirn, author of Thumbsucker and Up In The Air)

Book Description:

Don't get lost in Vegas

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0719596203
• ISBN 13: 9780719596209
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432