Beautiful Children Pdf Summary
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.
Advance praise for Beautiful Children
Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity. Beautiful Children is fast, violent, sexy;like a potentially dangerous ride;it could crash at any moment but never does. The language has a rhythm wholly its own;at moments it is stunning, near genius. This book is big and wild;it is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment. A major new talent.
A. M. Homes
Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Beautiful Children is the best first novel I’ve read in years;certainly the best first novel of our newborn century. Charles Bock has written a masterpiece: tragic, comic, sexy, chilling, far-reaching, and wise; at once an accusation and a consolation, and a lucid portrait of what is happening at the very heart of our culture, and what it means to be a young American today.
READ
- Shiver Pdf Summary Reviews By Maggie Stiefvater
- The Last Olympian Pdf Summary Reviews By Rick Riordan
- The Good Soldiers Pdf Summary Reviews By David Finkel
- Catching Fire Pdf Summary Reviews By Suzanne Collins
Beautiful Children Review
VINE VOICE
3.0 out of 5 stars Have You Seen This, Child?
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2009
Verified Purchase
BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN is a pastiche, a literary version of a movie montage, this one perhaps to the tune of “Runaway Train,” the whole book centered around teen runaways and the causes and effects that surround them. The subject matter is suitably sober, provacative, unsettling. Bock follows in intimate detail the lives of teens and adults (and people who seem like both) as they all runaway in their own ways, either from homes, from troubles, or simply from themselves. In some cases, all three.
Bock is a skilled wordsmith, but too much so. People with the kind of grasp of language that he has sometimes don’t know when enough is too much, sort of like that friend we all have who is an amazing singer, but who annoys everyone to death by singing all the time and at the drop of a hat. Because this book is more a series of character studies than anything else, there are lots and lots of passages that are nothing but protracted narratorial monologues. Bock’s goal here is lofty, and he believes that loftly language is necessary to accomplish it.
Unfortunately, where the book succeeds the most is when Bock decides to stop telling and instead just shows. Kids misbehaving, parents arguing, losers and rejects claiming curb space, these moments are the book’s poignant heart. They do much more to illustrate life’s buffet of painful precedents than the protracted moments where Bock goes lapses into exhaustive pop psychology, describing character motivations and histories with such detail that they become dull and numbing.
In the acknowledgments, Charles Bock mentions that “This novel took a long time to write.” He also thanks someone for “shooting me full of all those drugs” and he is grateful to “Certain people in the world of adult entertainment … kind enough to take me … onto their sets.” I mention this because I think it’s indicative of where Bock got it wrong, and where he could’ve gotten it right. Bock was attempting an hardcore realism, hence the extensive (and maybe unnecessary — he shot himself full of drugs?) research. However, the best writers take that research and let it form the ambient backdrop of their own minds, using that knowledge to form honest and true characters and events. Instead of using what he learned to coax life into his book, Bock apparently just took everything he learned and dumped it en masse onto the pages. Hence the long, cheesy passages about what it’s like to snort heroin (I assume it was heroin). Hence the completely unnecessary diatribes about pornography. Hence so much telling.
Gut the novel of the encyclopedic research and leave behind the beautiful children (and adults) which it is about, and you’d have a real character study, a sharp and clarifying expose of why life sometimes regresses into abandonment embraced. Instead, you have an overfed beast of a book that is so gorged on exposition and detail that it lumbers through every chapter at a torturous pace. The people in this book are all running, which is why it is so unfortunate that the book itself merely crawls.
4.0 out of 5 stars Vegas, Baby
Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2013
Verified Purchase
I came across this book after reading a review Charles Bock wrote that served as a retrospective of the emergence of cartoons designed for an adult audience. The writing was engaging enough that it made me curious about his novel. When I discovered that he was doing with Las Vegas what Tom Wolfe did with New York, Atlanta, and Miami and challenged other authors to do by portraying modern American cities in literature, I was sold.
If other readers come away from this book feeling as if they’ve been privy to some unforgettable experiences but ultimately left feeling hollow, perhaps Bock has succeeded in conveying what Vegas is like from an local’s perspective.
Vegas is one of those cities that I’ve always found equally fascinating and repulsive. I’d imagine that it would be difficult to feel like one is truly living a wholesome and meaningful life there considering the foundation the city is built upon. Not that it would be impossible, but it must be far from the norm, and I feel that Bock does a good job conveying this. Even the most stable of the brilliantly portrayed characters in the book live lives that are based on flash, hustle, and materialism. None of the characters are free from deeply troubling elements, which I’m sure are much more common when one considers the motives that lead people to move to such a city. I suppose in the end, the book only confirmed the suspicions I already had after visiting the city a dozen or so times under a number of pretenses.
It’s a bit difficult to assign a star rating to this one, so I’m mainly basing it on how engaged I was the entire time. Unlike other reviewers, I was always drawn to the text and eager to continue reading up to the last page. I found the mystery component behind the disappearance of Newell to be secondary to all the other stories told, but a strong element of suspense that ultimately disappointed. Much like driving away from a weekend in Vegas, this book did not leave me feeling more optimistic, but it was a wild ride that I won’t forget.
About Charles Bock Author Of Beautiful Children pdf Book
Charles Bock Beautiful Children pdf Book is an American writer whose debut 2008 novel Beautiful Children was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year for 2008, and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Beautiful Children pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Random House; 1st Edition (January 22, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400066506
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400066506
- Item Weight : 1.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.57 x 1.41 x 9.67 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,766,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17,774 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 3.6 out of 5 stars 69 ratings
Get A Copy Of Beautiful Children pdf Or Paperback By Charles Bock
You Can get A Copy Of Beautiful Children pdf Or Paperback By Charles Bock from these online store links below.
