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Have You Seen This, Child?
“BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN is a pastiche, a literary version of a movie montage, this one perhaps to the tune of "Runaway Train," the whole book centered around teen runaways and the causes and effects that surround them. The subject matter is suitably sober, provacative, unsettling. Bock follows in intimate detail the lives of teens and adults (and people who seem like both) as they all runaway in their own ways, either from homes, from troubles, or simply from themselves. In some cases, all three.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-17.
Bock is a skilled wordsmith, but too much so. People with the kind of grasp of language that he has sometimes don't know when enough is too much, sort of like that friend we all have who is an amazing singer, but who annoys everyone to death by singing all the time and at the drop of a hat. Because this book is more a series of character studies than anything else, there are lots and lots of passages that are nothing but protracted narratorial monologues. Bock's goal here is lofty, and he believes that loftly language is necessary to accomplish it.
Unfortunately, where the book succeeds the most is when Bock decides to stop telling and instead just shows. Kids misbehaving, parents arguing, losers and rejects claiming curb space, these moments are the book's poignant heart. They do much more to illustrate life's buffet of painful precedents than the protracted moments where Bock goes lapses into exhaustive pop psychology, describing character motivations and histories with such detail that they become dull and numbing.
In the acknowledgments, Charles Bock mentions that "This novel took a long time to write." He also thanks someone for "shooting me full of all those drugs" and he is grateful to "Certain people in the world of adult entertainment ... kind enough to take me ... onto their sets." I mention this because I think it's indicative of where Bock got it wrong, and where he could've gotten it right. Bock was attempting an hardcore realism, hence the extensive (and maybe unnecessary -- he shot himself full of drugs?) research. However, the best writers take that research and let it form the ambient backdrop of their own minds, using that knowledge to form honest and true characters and events. Instead of using what he learned to coax life into his book, Bock apparently just took everything he learned and dumped it en masse onto the pages. Hence the long, cheesy passages about what it's like to snort heroin (I assume it was heroin). Hence the completely unnecessary diatribes about pornography. Hence so much telling.
Gut the novel of the encyclopedic research and leave behind the beautiful children (and adults) which it is about, and you'd have a real character study, a sharp and clarifying expose of why life sometimes regresses into abandonment embraced. Instead, you have an overfed beast of a book that is so gorged on exposition and detail that it lumbers through every chapter at a torturous pace. The people in this book are all running, which is why it is so unfortunate that the book itself merely crawls.” -
Strangely arresting
“I give this book four stars, even though I agree with most of the negative reviews. It does indeed focus on puerile characters going about mundane business, has a frequently confusing non-linear time format, and emphasises the negative aspects of human character to a flaw. The cover is awful, and the author does seem to have a fascination with pornography and human nastiness in general. On the other hand, it is occasionally brilliantly written (the descriptions of life on the streets are as realistic and powerful as anything I've read to date) you do finding yourself caring about the characters, and it provides a vivid and uncompromising picture of the other side of Las Vegas.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-15.
This is the first fiction book I have been able to finish this year. It is strangely arresting. If you're looking for a book that really holds your interest, I would definitely recommend it.” -
Too depressing to be so long.
“I didn't find this book to be boring. I thought the characters were interesting and I get the "this is the way real life is" thing. However, I found myself staying up late and turning pages hoping that, at some point, I would get a small return on my investment (of time). While I don't require, or wish for, a Hollywood ending, I do wish that ONE of the story lines would have veered in a slightly more optimistic direction. It left me slightly depressed and annoyed. I don't think I want that much nihilism in my entertainment. At least if I watch a depressing movie, I've only killed two hours. If a book brings me down, well, there went a whole week. Just not entirely my thing.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-07-02. -
Holding The Mirror Up To Nature
“Summarizing his directions to the actors before performing for the King and court, Hamlet urges the Players to remember that the role of theater is "to hold, as `twere, the mirror up to nature", an apt explanation of the role of art as a whole. In this stunning first novel, author Charles Bock has provided the mirror for our culture into which the reader is compelled to look, long and hard, and it is not a pretty sight. But as in all the best art, his fearlessness and incisive vision has produced a view of our world that provides an often exhilarating and mostly frightening view of our children as detritus of a culture long past realizing what the cost of instant gratification has become.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-06-26.
The strength of Bock's writing is in his seemingly effortless ability to present the inner dialogue of his characters while maintaining an almost feverish forward motion. The fact that he moves the reader through time and character like a pinball bouncing off the electric neon of Las Vegas might seem discomforting to some readers, and the language is rough and aggressive in it's representation of people struggling to understand and survive at the edge of our world, an edge dominated by drugs, sex and desperation. There certainly is no tidy wrapping up of character story-lines - Bock's use of narrative device is tightly controlled, allowing him to use that strength as the final turn in the novel, thus providing the reader with a larger understanding of where he is taking us, rather than where he has led his characters.
This book is certainly not an easy read (and at times an uncomfortable one) but it is both a compelling and ultimately necessary journey for anyone willing to look in a mirror being held by a talented observer of the American cultural landscape.
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1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
A New Genre in Novel Writing
“Some novels defy categorization as they forge a whole new genre. This book is one of them. Readers are used to books in three parts: beginning, middle and end. This book is not like that. It melds together different aspects of life that are not broken down into any parts at all. There is no 'satisfying sense' that we have gone through the beginning, come to the middle, and with the last page, reached the end. Instead, we get a real slice of life -- a story of tragedy and lost souls in the middle of Las Vegas. The book keeps on going long after the last page is read.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-05-11.
The story is about Newell Ewing, a twelve year old boy who leaves his home to meet a friend and disappears. We are privy to his experiences with the shady youth and adults of seamy Las Vegas. Meanwhile, his parents search for any clues they might have overlooked as time passes and their son still remains missing.
We meet a cast of characters that fall somewhere between a horror movie and a Woody Allen comedy. There is the stripper, the teen-age wiccan, a group of runaways, a troubled artist and Newell himself, trying to navigate a world that is more like a crap shoot than the daily scheduled life he had once known.
If you can suspend any expectations of this book being like any you have read previously and open your mind to a new experience in novels (a novel novel), you are in for a wickedly troubling and juicy read.”
