The Errant Æsthete

Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children” has been rocking the publishing world out of its usual complacency for the past several weeks, garnering the kind of press and attention [See EA 01/27/08] that leaves established authors enviable and wannabe’s scorned.

The Elegant Variation used the occasion of a giveaway of copies of the book on Friday to discuss literature’s latest publishing blockbuster and the rancor and condemnation it’s eliciting from critics.

“We’ve been looking around, noting all the coverage that’s been lavished on Charles Bock and waiting for the inevitable backlash, which has arrived more or less exactly on schedule, mostly by people who haven’t read Beautiful Children and/or seem intent on finding the worst in publishing, in the press, in whomever. [...] We stand on our heads caterwauling about the lack of attention to literary writers, and then get our knickers twisted in a true Gordian knot when someone actually gets more than a single kind word. (The New York Times and NPR? How dare he?) Frankly, we’re delighted to see someone other than a cute twenty-something getting the attention for a change.

So, we can’t put a copy of Beautiful Children into the hands of all the cranks but we can ensure that at least one TEV reader has an informed opinion about the book that Liesl Schillinger called “fictional landscape as corruptly compelling as Vegas, and as beautiful as the illusions its characters cling to for survival” …

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.

So read the book, make up your own mind, don’t let cynical carping about coverage be your guide. There’s an actual book at the root of all the hullabaloo, one the author is probably happy to have you judge on its own merits. To do that, just do what you do every week - drop us a line, subject line “THINKING FOR MYSELF” and make sure you include your full mailing address. We’ll take all comers until 7 p.m. PST, at which time we’ll give a spin to our own roulette wheel, better known as the Random Number Generator, and report back with the results. End of vent. Thanks for playing. [LINK]