LEAVING LAS VEGAS

Charles Bock, the son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers, spent much of his childhood behind the counter of his parents’ shop, staring out at desperate adults as they hocked their most precious possessions in hopes of restoring their luck. “From the back of the store,” he recalls on his Web site, “I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It’s impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved — to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone.”

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN
By Charles Bock.
417 pp. Random House. $25.

Review by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Charles Bock (left)

After he left town, ending up on the East Coast for an M.F.A., Bock retained his searing memories. Now in his late 30s, he has spent a decade transforming them into his first novel, “Beautiful Children.” In it, he brings together the intersecting lives and innermost thoughts of parents and adolescents, strippers and pornographers, runaways and addicts, gamblers and comic-book illustrators, setting them against the neon-lit, heat-parched backdrop of Nevada, where “high walls and gated communities” join together in the night, “shimmering as if they were the surface of a translucent ocean,” and the colored towers of the Vegas Strip resemble a “distant row of glowing toys.” What should be said of the results of his labors? One word: bravo.

Like a whirling roulette wheel, “Beautiful Children” presents a mesmerizing blur. Imagine each vivid slash of color as a character, with his or her own impetus toward loss and stubborn striving. Bock slows or stops the wheel at will, bringing each slot into saturated individual focus: “The lens zooms in, then draws back.” There are far too many to describe in detail — a grieving salesman, cold-shouldered by his wife, consoling himself with porn at the office; a slender nameless teenager known only as “the girl with the shaved head,” who has a near-terminal case of attitude and seeks perilous thrills at a desert rock concert; a balding, pear-shaped cartoonist, burdened with the name Bing Beiderbixxe, playing Doom-like video games into his 20s and nurturing sociopathic fantasies; a midget convenience-store clerk; a stripper who attaches sparklers to her pneumatic bosom to score extra tips. So let’s fix on just one: Ponyboy, a buff, tattooed, opportunistic wastrel, salivated over by drugged teenage girls as “Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful,” and leered at by an obese porn distributor nicknamed Jabba the Hutt.
At the age of 20, Ponyboy pictures himself as a “pimped out Jedi” knight with a “kung fu grip” as he delivers X-rated videos to porn shops by mountain bike. He revels in the whine of the tattooer’s drill each time he gets new ink: “Electricity lit up Ponyboy’s skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravangza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy’s nostrils.”

Bock’s evocation of experiences most people will (mercifully) never share, and his depiction of each man, woman and child’s personal mythology is ravishing and raw. Each time he sets the wheel spinning, the mind races, tracking memories of distinct images amid the whir. As in a casino, all sense of time — and of day or night — disappears, as we wait to see where the ball will land.
The story revolves around the disappearance of a surly 12-year-old on a hot Nevada night. The boy, Newell, is the son of Lorraine Ewing, a prudish former showgirl, and her husband, Lincoln, a casino sales rep who gave up his dream of playing with the Dodgers when the “halfhearted low fives” of his teammates showed him he would never cut it: “Lincoln had the curse of being good enough to see just how much better he needed to be.” Trapped in his “own personal cage,” he lacks the will to rein in his son’s rebellion.