Charles Bock, the son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers, spent much of his childhood behind the counter of his parents’ shop, staring
out at desperate adults as they hocked their most precious possessions in hopes of restoring their luck. “From the back of the
store,” he recalls on his Web site, “I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It’s impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved — to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone.”After he left town, ending up on the East Coast for an M.F.A., Bock retained his searing memories. Now in his late 30s, he has spent a decade transforming them into his first novel, “
Beautiful Children.” In it, he brings together the intersecting lives and innermost thoughts of parents and adolescents, strippers and pornographers, runaways and addicts, gamblers and comic-book illustrators, setting them against the neon-lit, heat-parched backdrop of Nevada, where “high walls and gated communities” join together in the night, “shimmering as if they were the surface of a translucent ocean,” and the colored towers of the Vegas Strip resemble a “distant row of glowing toys.” What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo.Like a whirling roulette wheel, “Beautiful Children” presents a mesmerizing blur. Imagine each vivid slash of color as a character, with his or her own impetus toward loss and stubborn striving. Bock slows or stops the wheel at will, bringing each slot into saturated individual focus: “The lens zooms in, then draws back.” There are far too many to describe in detail — a grieving salesman, cold-shouldered by his wife, consoling himself with porn at the office; a slender nameless teenager known only as “the girl with the shaved head,” who has a near-terminal case of attitude and seeks perilous thrills at a desert rock concert; a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies; a midget convenience-store clerk; a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips. So let’s fix on just one: Ponyboy, a buff, tattooed, opportunistic wastrel, salivated over by drugged teenage girls as “Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful,” and leered at by an obese porn distributor nicknamed Jabba the Hutt. Children don’t understand the reality of the future. “Adulthood,” Bock writes, “with all its responsibilities and implications, is as impenetrable to a child as Martian trigonometry. That is one of the beauties of youth. And it is why someone has to be there, vigilant.” The fact that adults can’t always be vigilant — can’t anticipate the moment when the kid they’re trying not to alienate will make the awful, wrong decision — is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this splendid, disturbing novel. As Bock also shows, adults can’t even protect themselves from awful, wrong decisions.Early in the novel, Newell, Kenny and Beiderbixxe, the cartoonist, meet at a Saturday talk in a comics store called Amazin’ Stories, where Beiderbixxe has come to discuss his illustrated series, “Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut.” Newell isn’t impressed. Too young and undereducated to pick up on Beiderbixxe’s ironies, he’s bored. “Honestly, it wasn’t exactly easy to get jazzed about Bing Beiderbixxe,” he thinks, puffed up with preteen scorn. “From the looks of things, Newell wasn’t alone in this opinion. The store was largely empty, just a few underclassman types solemnly wandering the new arrivals racks, and three or four guys standing a respectful distance from the autograph table, nodding and listening, but seeming unconvinced.”Reading that scene, I remembered the time, last fall, when I unwittingly stumbled on Charles Bock, reading from this book at a now-defunct club called Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction. Bock had chosen a selection about the girl with the shaved head and the attitude, and as he spoke, transmitting her self-consciousness, slick with the clichés that are as much a part of a teenage girl’s wardrobe as lip gloss, I couldn’t anticipate the art that lay behind the larger work. I pouted like Newell, didn’t get it. Coming across the scene again in the novel, I sheepishly saw that its “limitations” were only the natural ones of a girl who could be no wiser, at 15 or 16, than she was. In “Beautiful Children,” Bock’s vision and voice create a fictional landscape as corruptly compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival — illustrating what he calls “the nobility inherent in struggles that cannot be won.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS ONLINE - ON MY BLOG.http://workfromhomedepot.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-books-summary-abstracts.html