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Book Nook
'Beautiful Children'
Charles Bock's missing-child story an impressive debut
By Vick Mickunas
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Review
"Beautiful Children,"
by Charles Bock
(Random House, 417 pages, $25)
Thousands of kids disappear every year in custody battles, as runaways, even in abductions. Most of them turn up eventually. Some never do.
This heartbreaking theme of the missing child has inspired a sub-genre of fiction. I call it missing-kid lit.
Charles Bock begins his debut novel, "Beautiful Children," as Lincoln and Lorraine Ewing are watching a home movie of their son Newell. He was 12 years old when he went out one evening with an older friend. Newell never came home.
"Beautiful Children" uncoils like a gorgeous, deadly serpent. It's set in the City that Never Sleeps, Las Vegas. Bock grew up there. His family ran a pawnshop. His book sprawls with all the mind-numbing brilliance of Las Vegas' hypnotic neon excess.
Bock's Las Vegas is the City of Broken Dreams. The author retraces that tragic evening when the Ewing boy disappeared. Our time sense gets distorted as events jitter backwards and stutter forwards. It's a technique that evokes a casino where there are no clocks, where gamblers can muddle their concept of day and night. Like a gambler who doesn't know when to quit, I could not put this book down.
The Ewings suffered a great loss, their son. As this story develops we discover that there are many other "beautiful children" who are lost. Some of them are runaways. They live hard lives on the outer fringes of society. Initially, we are repelled by these druggies, panhandlers and thieves.
Bock helps us to understand that beneath the scary tattoos, dirt and poverty these are human beings struggling to feel some glimmer of joy. The drifter Lestat remembers a rare moment in nature: "he'd stared contemplatively at how moss was growing along the barks of fallen trees, and for a time, he'd felt a deep and abiding tranquility, a peace whose very idea under normal circumstances he would have denied and ridiculed."
The missing boy, Newell, was hyperactive. He was also mouthy, rebellious and troubled. His mother immerses herself in all the literature about missing children. She learned that "five hundred thousand to 1.5 million adolescents left or were forced out of their homes each year."
She realizes that her son possessed many of the "traits that any parent recognized as defining the teen years — self-absorption, feelings of being unjustly persecuted when you did not get what you wanted, the twisted logic, the self-serving conclusions, the love of melodrama."
Meanwhile, on the mean streets of this town without pity the drifters and derelicts cross paths. Some of them saw the boy. Where will this mystery lead?
Some readers will object to the way this story ends. I've concluded that our desire to reach a particular literary destination can diminish our appreciation for the stunning scenery seen along the way. "Beautiful Children" is all about the trip. It will take you lots of places. Where you end up is really up to you.
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 2/15/08; 12:52:49 PM
from the dept.
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