Beautiful Children: A Novel

Author - Charles Bock ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Random House was reviewed on 3-Nov-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book Beautiful Children: A Novel by Random House. I understand some writers forgo a plot line, concentrating more on characterization. In that case the characters must be detailed and life-like, then the plot-line can sometimes take care of itself. In this book the characters are vague. You can barely tell one from the other. How old is Kenny? Is Pony Boy Cherry´s boyfriend as well as the girl with the shaved-head? Too vague. Too many unanswered questions. No story. No plot. Who cares? Poor writing
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2) Hardcover Book Beautiful Children: A Novel by Random House. I wanted so badly to love this book. I feel for the concept and dug in deep for the story. In the end, I felt like I was the one doing most of the work. Charles Bock had talent, but Beautiful Children sputtered as badly as the FBI-Mobile in the story.

Bock made me dizzy. Don´t get me wrong, I enjoy multiple points of view and don´t mind moments of confusion, but Bock drained me. One page of text in particular jumped into the heads of no less than four characters. It wasn´t difficult to follow, but left me disconnected with everyone involved.

The one true sparkle of the novel was Bock´s ability to describe the pain and aimlessness of Newell´s parents. He got me there, reached me. For that, I believe Bock can deliver the goods with a different story.

I also thought his use of punctuation and sentence structure was puzzling. I realize it´s his art and he deserves the freedom to flow without the restraints of accepted style. It didn´t bother me, but if that sort of thing bugs you, don´t read this book.

In the end, nothing really happened. The characters were interesting, but they didn´t do anything. If he had condensed his 432 pages into 150 and then followed with story of interaction and consequence, Bock would have a winner.
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3) Hardcover Book Beautiful Children: A Novel by Random House. 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.¤

4) Hardcover Book Beautiful Children: A Novel by Random House. This book was horrible. I expected something at least interesting from reading the jacket but ended up with a book that despite all of the attempts to be shocking is really quite boring. I forced myself to plow through this book because I like to finish books once I begin them but it never redeems itself though it does get the tiniest more interesting around section three (which occurs 269 pages into the book). There is no strong sense of story or suspense. Not too much ever really happens. Passages describe small acts or descriptions of things in minutia and the constant skipping around from past to present to future and dislikable character to dislikable character means I never got drawn into the story and what is going to happen to the people in it. Also, though I expected the book to be dark (and often like my books that way), with a title like Beautiful Children I also expected some beauty, some glimmer of something transcendent or enlightening. What I got instead was a portrayal of an ugly jaded and dull world with no beauty in it. Parts of the story also made me grimace because it just felt like the author was trying too hard. The harsh language, the sex, the teenage slang, the chat room jargon. These could have their place but instead they are what the characters are reduced to. I felt like Bock used these elements as an attempt to shock the reader or to try to make himself and his characters sound more "authentic". It had the opposite effect. The characters become caricatures. I am not one to like "suger coated" stories and generally like what I consider a more unvarnished portrayal of things but I found the obsession with rough sex scenes like those found in porn and Cheri the stripper and her candle holder nipples unnecessary. I found myself wondering why Bock spent so much time writing these voyuristic scenes in such detail. Did he want me as the reader to "get off" on them? Is he trying to use sex to sell his book or shock his readers enough to get publicity? Is he trying to prove how "real" and "nitty gritty" his story is? Well, sorry. I am not shocked. I am not aroused. The scenes added nothing to the story. His time would have been better spent actually developing his characters. Maybe he could have humanized Cheri and made her a real multi faceted person. Instead he exploits his characters as much as the characters in his book do.¤

5) Hardcover Book Beautiful Children: A Novel by Random House. Cant even get through the audiobook. The author goes into tedious minutae about their hair, clothes, underwear, shoes etc ad nauseum to the point that I thought he was a crime scene investigator. So much detail that you cant figure out what the story is. Its too bad because the idea for the book is very good.¤

6) Hardcover Book Beautiful Children: A Novel by Random House. 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¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 1-Dec-2008, 14000665069781400066506, 300-400-430-9X0-500-200-061-991-NSB-8

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