Coming to a Shelf Near You: Beautiful Children

The latest review to pique my interest is Liesl Schillinger's report on a debut novel from Charles Bock. Schillinger expounds on Bock's Beautiful Children for tomorrow's edition of the New York Times Book Review.

Vital Stats

Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Random House (January 22, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1400066506
ISBN-13: 978-1400066506

From the Book Description

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.

Unlike almost everyone I know, Vegas is a city that holds no allure for me. Yet the idea of a well-written novel that takes place there is somehow very appealing. I will definitely try to get my hands on this book over the coming year.