Reviewed by John Burdett
20th January 2008

Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America’s brittle
and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock’s exceptional
Beautiful Children, so much as the fact from which he explores the survival
strategies – usually doomed – of the citizen-mutants themselves. He proves
an expert guide, being a native of the city with an encyclopedic knowledge
of every perverted nook and narcissistic cranny. His ability to share a
deep understanding of America’s million or so lost street kids and their
tormented parents gives the book a whiff of greatness.

The story begins with 12-year-old Newell running away from his home in a
suburb of Vegas. It almost goes without saying that the lad is a
foul-mouthed, cynical, needy, cute, emotionally exhausted,
old-before-his-time product of the city, but what is most impressive is
Bock’s restraint here and throughout the book: Newell is not fleeing
anything like sexual abuse, poverty or starvation. His mom and dad adore
him, and, as his mother reflects, “They had tried to give Newell everything
he had wanted. Where was the crime in that?” In other words, he is spoilt
and given to tantrums. By implication, the motive for his decision to join
the hordes of America’s lost street kids is the impossibility of finding a
path to adulthood in a world which has no knowledge of such a thing. His
parents are not bad but, as damaged goods themselves, have very little
structure to their relationship beyond sex and not much talent in relating
to their child or each other.

The novel presents a cityscape inhabited by a sub-species of homo urbanus:
young men and women who embody an obsession with sex so bizarre that sodomy
is merely the platform from which they bungee jump into a moral void of
alarming practices where the tattoo gun, the scalpel and the needle are key
tools.

Cheri Blossom had her nipples cut open so that she can use them as candle
holders for her floor show; Bing Beiderbixxe is a bald undergrad nerd whose
imagination works exclusively in the realm of pornography; Ponyboy is a
late teen coiffeur-conscious deadbeat who improbably drops toothpaste drool
on his backside. Kenny, a gay virgin whose childhood was spent touring pawn
shops with his wacky gambling aunt, picks up our young hero in his
dilapidated “FBImobile,” makes inept passes at the kid and, equally
ineptly, offers to take him home, an opportunity that Newell half-heartedly
rejects. This leaves Kenny stuck with an increasingly delinquent Newell as
the night proceeds.

“What am I supposed to do,” Kenny asks at the end of the book, not only on
his own behalf but in the name of lost and confused humanity. “Just what am
I supposed to do now?” All these characters stand alone in paranoid
isolation, even when they are having sex with each other.

Unfortunately, this state of affairs has a poor impact on the structure of
the book in that there is often no apparent connection between the various
subplots. Beautiful Children is not an easy read, nor is it a polished
work. Bock’s moments of simple honesty are far more impressive than his
poetic flights of fancy, which can seem gaudy and pretentious, and one
wishes his editor had persuaded him to cut a third. The two-speed time
structure, ingenious though it is, can be an irritating impediment to
understanding who is doing what and when. Put simply, the book needs to be
read at least twice before one can grasp its full scope – a quixotic
requirement, coming from an author who is painfully aware of the limits of
the modern attention span.

And yet this novel does deserve to be read more than once because of the
extraordinary importance of its subject matter and the sensitivity with
which he treats it. As I considered Bock’s work, Lawrence’s opening to Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take
it tragically,” rattled constantly through my brain.

Beautiful Children is also about the aftermath of war – not merely Iraq,
although that is mentioned – but more importantly “the war of all against
all,” which seems to have been raging for a couple of generations at least
now. It is, as Bock demonstrates, destroying our kids with the demonic
ingenuity of modern drugs and technology, not to mention the demise of the
family itself, and yet we still refuse to take it tragically. In the no
man’s land of Bock’s Vegas there remain only the baroque survival
strategies of sometimes well-meaning but hopelessly inept and appallingly
young mutants. I cannot think of another novelist who has dared to attack
this most pressing and complex issue so ferociously. Bock is to be
commended for his high achievement.

John Burdett is the author, most recently, of “Bangkok Haunts”.