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Beautiful Children

Charles Bock

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Feb 03, 2008 Jessica rated it liked it

Shelves: borrowed-from-library

I liked and admired this book more than I loved it. It has aspirations to be a pretty big investigation and indictment of a culture that chews up dreamers and spits them out, but most of the characters are too thinly drawn to deepen it to that level. Instead, it's a very readable story about connections and loss, exploitation and love, fumbles, mistakes, accidents, viciousness, and hope, told in a non-linear structure that in a way is like reading reassembled fragments of a shattered mirror. In I liked and admired this book more than I loved it. It has aspirations to be a pretty big investigation and indictment of a culture that chews up dreamers and spits them out, but most of the characters are too thinly drawn to deepen it to that level. Instead, it's a very readable story about connections and loss, exploitation and love, fumbles, mistakes, accidents, viciousness, and hope, told in a non-linear structure that in a way is like reading reassembled fragments of a shattered mirror. In this case, the mirror is reflecting the neon and grit of Las Vegas, itself a major player in the story.

You can read a better summary of the plot and characters in a number of places, but the story centers on an adolescent boy, undergoing the usual rebellion, who disappears into the night and is never heard from again, and the people who cross paths with him and those around him. Although a major chunk of the story centers on a stripper with bigger aspirations whose boyfriend, a bike messenger for a porn distributor, tries to exploit her dreams in numerous ways and ends up tragically ruining multiple lives, the most moving story here is that is the missing boy's parents, and how they try to cope with the void of his loss.

I found the exploration of the parents' pain moving and real, while the exploration of the pain of the stripper and other characters sucked into the porn vortex struck me in a way I'm pretty sure the author didn't intend. The only time some of these emotionally deadened characters can feel desire is when viewing the worst kind of exploitative pornography, or the inhuman deformity of the stripper's body, and it's clear we're supposed to see how awful this is. But Bock describes these things in such explicit detail, trying to show the humanity beneath, the pain behind the eyes of the owner of the giant boobs, that these are some of the most, well, stirring passages in the book, which itself ends up producing an almost pornographic effect.

Still, it's a pretty accomplished book, and I very much appreciated that though you learn a lot about the characters and what happens to them, ends are not tied up neatly and many mysteries remain. ...more

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Dec 03, 2015 HeavyReader rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Trigger Warning: A woman is raped in this book, although it is not a graphic scene. Actually, the rape takes place "off screen." We all know it happened, but we don't have to read the gory details. Also, women are pretty much treated like shit throughout the book.

I had a difficult time rating this book. While it was well-written, giving it three stars and saying I "liked it" seemed like a stretch. I didn't really "like it," although I was in some ways captivated by it and kept on reading. To use ...more

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Jul 22, 2008 Daniel rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2008

Charles Bock does a good job, for the most part, of juggling multiple characters, plotlines and points in time -- I say "for the most part" because the comic-book artist is nearly forgotten in the novel's second half -- but the book falls apart in its voices. Bock attempts third-person narrative adopting the voice and viewpoint of each character, but only Ponyboy's sections are successful in this regard. The other characters lack distinctive voices -- perhaps because their personalities are less ...more

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Feb 15, 2008 Liz rated it really liked it

Shelves: library

The reviews were glowing, so I added it to my library request list. When it showed up (pretty quickly!) and I read the dustjacket, I wondered how good it would really be. A novel about a missing child, a stripper who thinks of her life as a movie, punks, runaways, awkward teens, and a comic book artist set in Vegas? It sounded like an entertaining read but not necessarily a really good one. But I loved this book. The switches between characters worked really well, it never got too hipster-noveli ...more

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Feb 15, 2008 Ellen added it

Shelves: want-to-read

**Alert: You can download this book FOR FREE at Charles Bock's website through Friday, Feb. 29. Here's the site.**

Because everyone is talking and writing about it... ...more

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