Beautiful Children

The humanity underlying the grimy underbelly and suburban ennui of Las Vegas.
Beautiful Children may be Charles Bock's debut novel, but its characters are so fully realized, so absolutely human, it clearly heralds the arrival of a major literary voice. Bock treats the grimy underbelly and suburban ennui of Las Vegas with equal humanity, often blurring the boundaries of complicity and victimhood.

Beautiful Children tells the story of missing 12-year-old Newell Ewing and the unspeakable heartbreak suffered by his parents, Lincoln and Lorraine. But the story of Newell's disappearance touches (directly or indirectly; consciously or not) the lives of an eclectic mix of characters as well: Kenny, an awkward high school kid who befriends Newell despite their age difference; a teenage Wicca girl; a coterie of street punks; an overweight and sexually frustrated comic book artist; a stripper and her boyfriend; a group of underground pornographers.

Unflinchingly exposing the raw humanity of his characters, Bock is not afraid to address the alienation a stripper feels from her breast implants, where lesser writers might feel tempted to idealize a missing child, Bock is willing to portray Newell as a sassy, irritating brat.

If the brilliance of the writing can be distilled into one scene, it is when Lincoln describes his obsession with moments of accidental intimacy in his pornographic movie collection — an actress stroking the brow of her co-star, for example, captured in a few short frames. In a way, this is precisely how Bock sees Las Vegas — as a place of deep humanity, in spite of itself, in spite of the facade it puts on.

How perfect that narrator Mark Deakins has both played Tybalt in a stage production of “Romeo & Juliet” and provided voices for video games like "Hitman: Blood Money." This diversity allows him to masterfully capture everyone from Newell to Cherry the stripper to Jabba the pornographer. More than once, I played passages multiple times, finding new nuances. And more than once, I laughed (or cried) hard enough that I needed a second listen.