Book of Jan/Feb :: MOLI Book Club

View Album

Beautiful Children: Fearless, empathetic, all-encompassing in scope, Charles Bock’s debut novel BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN (Random House; January 29, 2008) delivers a masterful panorama of Las Vegas and the web of lonely children and suffering adults who struggle under its glimmering lights—homeless teenagers, strippers, comic book illustrators, pawn brokers, musicians, video store clerks. At the center of this rich Dickensian universe is a missing boy, and the search for him leads to a swirling climax of heartache and brittle redemption. One Saturday night in Las Vegas, Newell Ewing, age twelve, goes out with an older 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 stripper who imagines moments of 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 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. Rarely has a city been explored so tenderly and ruthlessly, or loneliness so vividly rendered as its own dark paradise. In BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, Vegas becomes a microcosm of modern America, and Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to offer us an odyssey of heartache and redemption.