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"Adulthood,"
Charles Bock writes, "with all its responsibilities and implications,
is as impenetrable to a child as Martian trigonometry." Any
reader will immediately recognize fallacy in this ridiculous
analogy—Martian trig would be impenetrable to anyone.
In his novel Beautiful Children, first-time author
Bock attempts to describe to the readers the lives of his
mottled cluster of Las Vegas denizens, but the effort falls
as flat as a pre-boob-job Vegas showgirl.
In Beautiful
Children, which takes place in lugubrious, overly limned
Las Vegas, spoiled brat Newell Ewing goes missing after attending
a comic book signing. In the ensuing days, his mother Lorraine
refuses to sexually satisfy her emotionally stunted husband
Lincoln, and a disparate cast is introduced: porn-obsessed
comic book writer Bing Beiderbixxe, lonely gay virgin Kenny,
and stripper Cheri Blossom. Eventually the plot starts to
come together, but not before reading and deciphering becomes
a chore for the reader.
Bock
makes all the mistakes one expects from a debut author who
has been working on a book for over ten years: creating a
world no one but he and his immediate family would care about,
naming characters via a Pynchonion nomenclature algorithm,
and describing common objects rather than naming them (a Coca-Cola
Big Gulp becomes "sixty-four ounces of carbonated caffeination").
His sentences are overly long and light on verbs. His indebtedness
to the White Male Authors—Mailer, Updike, Pynchon, DeLillo—is
obvious, but Bock's dick of a book is even smaller than one
of Updike's more flaccid entries. Just like all the White
Male Authors, the women in Bock's world are either wanton
whores or prudish prigs who are absolutely unwilling to please
their men. Here's a passage where a man tries to get his wife
to give him a blowjob:
And
simple as Simon, just because his brain had locked for
five seconds and he had inserted his ass into his mouth,
the subject of conversation no longer was Lorraine getting
lovey on his nuts, nor was it Lincoln's urges, nor even
the undiscussed but not-insubstantial problem of Lorraine
only liking sex in the missionary position. The subject
was not that Lincoln would have given his left testicle
for something besides plain one-scoop vanilla sex and
it was not the sheer volume of Lorraine's hesitancies
and it sure as hell was not Lincoln's fear that all of
these hesitancies pointed to deeper issues that needed
to be addressed in this marriage, questions about limits
and boundaries and how far she was willing to go to please.
No. Because of a blunder that Lincoln, dumbass that he
was (he was such a dumbass), knew better than to
make, things had firmly and irrevocably moved into Bad
Man Makes Girl Cry Territory. Pig Territory.
And how
did he try to get this event to occur? By saying to her this:
"Except, um, is there any timetable on just when this beautiful
and perfect event might take place? Any ideas on when those
planets are going to align? Because, sweet darling, from my
side of the fence, that particular special's been dropped
from the menu."
The stereotypical
characters are just what you'd expect from a white man in
his 30's. They are the sorts of people boys idolize as a kids—like
the geeky porn-obsessed comic book writer, the punk rock girl,
the savvy stripper—and the sorts of people he despises
as an adult, like the wife who won't give blowjobs. The stripper,
who borders on being a parody of a stripper, thinks things
like, "She'd been at the game long enough that controlling
a man was, as a process, about the same to her as cutting
away the mealy part of an apple that had been left on top
of the fridge overnight."
The book
is structured in the style du jour: parts, chapters,
sections within chapters. One chapter is close to 100 pages
long, which could lead one to think that he got sidetracked
at the end. Or perhaps he was trying to communicate the vast
tireless expanse of Nevada desert where that chapter takes
place. Finally, after all these nouns and stereotypes, there
is a moral, and it's exactly the one you think it is: Reach
out, get help. Don't be alone.
Beautiful
Children is as sordid and moribund as an image of a tot
dressed in footie PJs riding in a shopping cart being pushed
by his crack-whore mom in the Walmart at 3AM. This lugubrious
novel will no doubt be found, unread past page 6, on the shelves
of every fan of the Big Novels of the White Male Authors,
collecting dust over the next ten years until the owner deems
it finally chuckable. Expect to find many copies at the Salvation
Army, next to the ubiquitous Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full.
(April
1, 2008)
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