Beautiful Children

Clayton Moore, Special to the Rocky

Friday, February 1, 2008

* Fiction. By Charles Bock. Random House, $25.95. Grade: B-

Plot in a nutshell: It's a hard- knock life in Sin City, and the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas is bitterly reflected in this grim fictional expose of the city's underage runaways, predators and orphans.

Bock's ambitious, multilayered story turns on the disappearance of 12-year-old Newell Ewing, whose flight from home is more rebellion than self-preservation. Leaping between his mother's subsequent search and flashbacks to the long night in which he vanished, Beautiful Children boils down a dozen lives full of regret, their tangential connections distilled into a volatile fusion.

Lorraine Ewing earns perhaps the most charitable portrayal as she prowls the city's homeless shelters, bouncing from grief to culpability. Her husband Lincoln is trying to set things right, but balancing his job as a convention booker with an increasingly virulent addiction to hard-core pornography becomes tricky.

Newell is prone to the temptations of adolescence, prowling the streets with his repressed older friend Kenny. Their stories blend with that of a visiting illustrator who takes advantage of the children who admire his craft, along with a host of predatory locals.

Most disquieting is the book's profane second act, which finds a parasite named Ponyboy trying to manipulate his stripper girlfriend Cheri into having sex on camera. "Where do they get all these girls?" Lincoln wonders.

What emerges is a painfully raw sociology of a nihilistic 21st-century America. Ultimately, its bleak story becomes a roll call of refugees, all going nowhere, fast.

Sample of prose: A pregnant, homeless girl bares her teeth: "Don't front on me. I been streeting so long I got my own milk carton."

Pros: Bock's upbringing among pawn brokers in Sin City injects a visceral authenticity to his portrayal. The author has justifiably earned praise from bards like Jonathan Safran Foer and A.M. Holmes.

Cons: The story's squalid portrayal of a host of subcultures, including strip joints, pornographic films and body modification, borders on voyeurism.

Final word: Bock takes an admirable stab at focusing our attentions on the suffering of the meek, but only readers with forgiving hearts and strong constitutions need apply.