eMusic Q&A: Charles Bock

Charles Bock is understandably nervous. His debut novel Beautiful Children, a decade in the making, has been generating attention for months for its ambitious portrayal of misfits, runaways and lost souls trapped on the life highway that is Las Vegas. At thirty-eight, the Vegas-born Bock, now a Manhattan resident, seems acutely aware that his first effort might be his one chance at literary glory. On a weekday afternoon at a Murray Hill café, we discuss the changing face of Las Vegas, the plight of missing children, the value of championing independent bands and how building a metaphorical bomb in your basement can pay off in big ways.

You set Beautiful Children in Las Vegas, your hometown. Why Vegas, why now?

Now because now is when I finished the book, and now is when the good people at Random House decided to publish it. Why Vegas is a different story: I grew up there, though I left when I was eighteen, and my family still lives there. For a fair amount of my early writing life I didn't want to write about Las Vegas. I didn't want to be one of those fiction writers capable of only writing veiled autobiography. Then at a certain point in my mid-20s I started writing a short story that moved different characters through Vegas in a span of one night. The story was too overloaded for a short story so it kept growing, first into a novella, then even longer. Even though those early efforts weren’t any good, there was something there that made me keep going.

It struck me while reading Beautiful Children that the novel would lapse in and out of time. Some parts felt current while others more rooted in the 1980s and 1990s.

The book took me about ten years to write. In that time Las Vegas boomed; it was the fastest growing city in America for over a decade, so from the time I left at 18 from the time I finished, turning 37, it reinvented itself a number of times. Vegas has just metastasized, become exponentially larger, so one thing I had to learn to do was create a Vegas in my head that was the combination of what I grew up in and what was happening to the city. It couldn't be an up-to-the-moment Vegas because it's constantly evolving. Since fiction will never be ahead of the curve it has to be truer, to find an essential truth. Eventually I settled on a Las Vegas that encapsulates what I think is happening there. Already things I have in the book are outdated. At some point one of the characters, the girl with the shaved head, talks about starving children in Ethiopia. That's a sign of how long it took to write because now it would be starving children in Darfur.

Let's talk about the novel's structure. You have multiple viewpoints and many character perspectives. How did this come about?

Trial and failure. As I think anyone my age or anyone who came of age in the late 1990s as a writer or student during that time would, I had an amazing amount of influences. Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Strong Motion; Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Mary Gaitskill and A.M. Homes, all these writers who are breaking down barriers left and right. George Saunders with Civilwarland and Pastoralia. The list is pretty large. One thing I loved and responded to, especially in Infinite Jest, were the layers — things happening simultaneously. I wanted to emulate that non-linear approach, but it turned out to be a horrible mistake. After three years I looked at the draft I had and it was a huge mess, I had no idea what was going on. My choices were to give up and start something new or figure it out. Six years in: second or third draft gets done. Still no idea what's going on. I still had a huge mess, but a closer mess. I had an idea and I stayed with it, and as I wrote I grew as a writer and each draft allowed for corrections to the previous draft. I learned to find space where I had to get back to the narrative, learned I had to have a through line where people could follow, had to have peaks and valleys, Dostoyevsky, end of a chapter high moment of drama.

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Friends used to joke about how big it was going to be. Drafts came in at 700, 900 pages.

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You had very ambitious works and authors in mind then. How much did you have to write to produce the 400-odd pages in this book?

I don't know the answer to that question. It is a good question! Truth is I worked on this novel for 10 years. Not ten years of watching Seinfeld at 11 PM. Ten years of a high priority in my life. When I was dating the woman who is now my wife, I would only go out with her two nights a week because I couldn't give more time to that. She didn't like it, but now she's in grad school and understands things a little more.

Clearly she understood enough to marry you.

Yes, a huge amount of faith because she married me in the middle of my writing the book. It wasn't close to being done — I was going back for the last year of rewrites, so it's a testament to her. But I wrote ungodly amounts. Friends used to joke about how big it was going to be. Drafts came in at 700, 900 pages. I wouldn't show it to people because you just can't do that to them. It's a big commitment, it means too much. I had to wait until it was the best I could do. In my case, I had to do a lot of writing to find out what the story was. It was cutting, more rewriting, more cutting. I hope that at the end it reads like it always existed in that form, that it has a logic and brain to it that's very organic. The truth is, every book has an internal logic, but authors seldom start out with it. Every writer has to work into finding it and listen for it. In my case it involved more failure than I can ever explain to you.

So even if the book was a perceived albatross, you still kept at it.

Maybe I should have started over, but I couldn't. I lived in fear I'd be one of those people with a half-finished novel in a drawer, never knowing if I was good enough. There were many times I'd have to take on other jobs. I was a third-shift legal proofreader. I ghostwrote a couple of books. The year before the book sold I worked 2 days a week, 10 hours a day at a celebrity tabloid. That was my future. I'd written myself into a corner and there was only one way out. But writing, as hard as it can be, can also be ecstatically fun. I entertained myself tremendously with this book. It's very dark, yes, but it's fun as hell. It quotes kung fu movies, Iron Maiden, Suicidal Tendencies. Lot of good jokes, interesting intellectual questions. I could live with working on something that engaged me [even though] I couldn't shake the feeling of "I am building a bomb in my basement." Either the bomb was going to blow me up or I was going to blow up the world. It's like what Axl Rose says, "Victory or Death."

Interesting you bring up Axl’s “do or die” philosophy in light of the ongoing Chinese Democracy brouhaha.

I've seen the new band five times. I have a T-shirt from their 2003 tour. I have another from the 1999 Vegas show. In a way, Beautiful Children was my Chinese Democracy except I hadn't done Appetite for Destruction first. I'd like to believe this book could maybe be my Literature for Destruction.

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It's quite possible these characters are all psychological reflections of me.

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Many of the characters have unreachable goals. There’s Lincoln and Loraine's search for their missing son, Cheri imagining her life as a screenplay, Ponyboy trying to eke some romanticism out of his life. Did this theme jump out at you in early drafts?

Interesting you bring that up. It's quite possible these characters are all psychological reflections of me while I was working on the book thinking, “this will never be published, it will never be finished.” Every character has this impossible dream. I don't think I was consciously aware, but then fiction is all about journeys of some sort or another.

Another major theme in Beautiful Children is the plight of missing children. I couldn't help but draw parallels between Newell's disappearance and the 1978 abduction of six-year-old Cary Sayegh from a Las Vegas school.

I went to the same religious school as Cary, Temple Beth Shalom. I went to the afternoon Hebrew school and he was at the day school. I was a couple of years older than him. That saga was a part of my childhood. There's a reference to Cary in the book that's oblique, though I don't know that Cary was someone I thought consciously about. The story was in my head during this and it's something I grew up with. He was taken away in a brown Rolls-Royce, so when I was a kid you literally looked on the streets for a brown Rolls-Royce — or if you saw one, you wondered if that was the car

Were there any other cases that affected you?

I didn't want to appropriate anyone's story in the book — that was very important. All the names of runaways in chapter 7, for example, are either made up, or are mashups of the names of kids who ran away and were missing in Nevada. I took liberties and fictionalized their stories. After I sold the book, I did a couple of workshops at Covenant House. I had an idea in my head about characters who are so unhappy, who have to escape their surroundings. Then I learned all these stories and modified them to be closer to what I wanted to do. I didn't want to create life-affirming stories, especially about the runaways. I didn't want to encourage a 16 year-old to take off. Maybe that 16 year-old will need to do other things to secure his life, but living on the street is not romantic. I still wanted to give some sliver of hope. That the best of humanity should be in there — I wanted the characters to at least be trying, even if it's a misguided effort. My real hope is that the book is about people that we might cross the street to avoid. I want to foster some sense of compassion and understanding for those who are basically lost and forgotten and damned and, yes, who do it to themselves.

I understand there's a CD you helped put together that's a companion to Beautiful Children.

The CD is promotional, and was sent out to book and music blogs. On my website, each web page has its own song, provided by an unsigned indie band. This happened because I emailed my friend Wendy Case, who’s a member of the Dertroit group the Paybacks, and asked if she could give me a song. Then thanks to her and her manager we ended up getting a bunch of bands, many from the Detroit area, to contribute songs. We’ve got Rock 'n Roll Soldiers, from Oregon. Jamie Barnes, a singer/songwriter who I saw at the Happy Ending reading series, contributed a beautiful song. So many talented people out there, making so much great music that’s totally worthwhile. The trouble is that I never know how to find them. Are you going to search through 18 million MySpace pages?

I also started a MySpace page where we'll put up any song that's based on the book. I'd love it if Slash or Buckethead or Trent Reznor did a song, or if Jane's Addiction got back together — which they should do — for the soundtrack. Or maybe some crazy bastard in the middle of Omaha, Nebraska would tear shit up. There are so many talented people who we don't know about, building bombs in their basement. It doesn't mean that every bomb is successful, doesn't mean that every unknown writer is ready to have a book published. If Beautiful Children had taken me nine and a half years instead of ten it wouldn't have been published. It takes as long as it takes. Just keep throwing those fucking bombs.