Depravity's Rainbow

Ruth Franklin, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008

About
Beautiful Children; Charles Bock; Random House, 417 pp., $25. 

If you ate breakfast in America during the 1980s, you probably remember 
the milk-carton children. A face staring out next to your bowl of 
cereal, identified only by the barest of data -- name, date of birth, 
height, weight, date last seen -- and accompanied by the vaguely 
implicatory question: Have you seen this child? The best known were the 
victims of abduction, like six-year- old Etan Patz, the first child ever 
pictured on a milk carton, who vanished en route to his school bus stop 
in Manhattan in 1979 and was never seen again; and Polly Klaas, the 
twelve-year-old girl kidnapped from her bedroom in 1993 and found 
murdered soon after, whose parents now run a website called the Milk 
Carton Project with a database of missing children.

The abductees are still the focus of news stories and Amber Alerts. 
But -- as a mother will learn in Charles Bock's magnificent first 
novel -- the majority of missing children are runaways. In Beautiful 
Children, they include Ponyboy, who left home after the death of his 
little brother and makes a living as a bike messenger delivering 
pornographic videotapes; the vampirishly skinny Lestat, who hitchhiked 
across the country to visit Anne Rice's house and never returned home; 
and a pregnant teenager known as "Danger-Prone Daphney," who brags that 
her own picture was once on a milk carton. She collected them as 
souvenirs, but since she had nowhere to keep them, the milk quickly 
spoiled, and eventually she lost the empty cartons as well.

Why do children disappear? This is one of the preoccupations of Bock's 
novel, which centers around the disappearance of Newell Ewing, age 
twelve, late one summer night in the desert outside Las Vegas. Vegas is 
Bock's hometown, and the novel's release was accompanied by interviews 
and profiles in which Bock detailed his upbringing there as the son of 
pawnshop owners. Critics have praised the novel for its fidelity to its 
gritty milieu, its insider's perspective on the sordid reality behind 
the ersatz glitz of America's most unreal city. But this is not a thinly 
disguised autobiography masquerading as a novel. The surface of 
Beautiful Children is as multifaceted and glittering as a disco ball, 
but underneath is an utterly convincing vision of the quicksand of 
corruption: how quickly a person can sink into it, and how difficult it 
is to pull yourself out.

Of course, Bock is hardly the first writer to take an interest in the 
American underworld. The Beats defiantly, and sometimes beautifully, 
elevated the seedy into a subject for literature, and writers from John 
Rechy to Arthur Bradford have embraced a style that might be called 
grunge fiction. But the similarities between that genre and Beautiful 
Children are only superficial. Bock's novel never devolves into a freak 
show. His strippers and punks do not interest him for whatever nocturnal 
or countercultural glamour they might confer on his book--which, in the 
end, is admirably conventional, in the sense of paying respect to the 
essential conventions of fiction's art, to which all the most 
accomplished novels must somehow reconcile themselves. His characters 
interest him as human beings, not as evidence of a picaresque past or as 
markers of some kind of wild-side lifestyle. And his prose is too lucid 
to sink into the banal raptures of drug-induced meandering.

Like Don DeLillo, his influential predecessor in chronicling 
contemporary fear, Bock sounds an alarm: something is wrong in America, 
his novel tells us, when we allow the current conditions to exist 
unchallenged and unchecked. Exquisitely attuned to what is most 
destabilizing in our culture, he has his finger on those veins of 
anxiety that start deep within the individual and flow outward to create 
a giant societal web of unease. But while DeLillo's characters have 
always been stick figures frozen into various gestures of anomie, Bock 
animates the flamboyant structure of his novel with a dark, pulsating 
heart, juggling with admirable facility the contrapuntal voices and 
stories of more than half a dozen major characters. With its famous 
facsimiles of New York and Egypt and Polynesia, Las Vegas may be a giant 
deception in the desert, but Charles Bock is the real thing.

Like the interlocking strands of a double helix, Beautiful Children 
moves simultaneously forward and back, circling around the moment of 
Newell's disappearance. In the first scene, his parents, Lincoln and 
Lorraine, are watching a videotape of him from a recent birthday party 
that contains the last known images of their son--soon to be reproduced 
in e-mail attachments and flyers and circulated anywhere he might be 
seen. Then the action jumps back to the afternoon of that last day, with 
Newell meeting his friend Kenny at a local comics store and setting in 
motion the events of that night. This back-and- forth pattern plays out 
over the course of the novel, expanding to encompass both the future 
(Lincoln and Lorraine during a year of life on their own) and the past 
(the numerous flashbacks through which we see the characters' history), 
while contracting relentlessly as Newell proceeds in something like real 
time through the evening and night of that decisive day.

Lorraine was a showgirl whose career ended abruptly with her pregnancy 
at age twenty, and Lincoln is a failed baseball player who does p.r. for 
the Kubla Khan Hotel, one of the local pleasure domes. Loving if 
somewhat vapid parents, neither has much of a relationship with their 
hyperactive, surly, distant son. Lorraine's conversations with him are 
conducted mainly through the rear-view mirror. Lincoln, trying 
unsuccessfully to connect, takes the boy to a UNLV basketball game. In 
one of the novel's characteristic shifts in viewpoint, we see the scene 
first through the eyes of Lincoln, swallowing his disappointment as 
Newell scampers off with friends before the national anthem has ended. 
Much later, when Newell replays the same scene in his mind, we discover 
that the other kids are just the boy's excuse to get away: he prefers to 
spend the game by himself, peering down from the upper deck, sailing 
onto the court paper airplanes made from the pages of the expensive 
program his father bought him. Throughout the novel, Bock uses this 
disjunction between points of view to great advantage, often cutting 
abruptly from one character to another to show how short is the distance 
from one person to the next, and how deep the gulf.

To call Newell a loner credits him with too much choice in the matter. 
His only friend is an older boy named Kenny--a gangly post-adolescent 
described as "an odd collection of lines and angles"--whom he meets at 
the comics store. A student at the vocational high school, Kenny has no 
family life to speak of: his father is an alcoholic and gambling addict 
who often "stumbled back down the proverbial twelve steps," and his aunt 
works in one of the downtown pawnshops catering to the desperate, where 
she was once a customer. His only real relationship with another human 
being took place at a remove. One day at school he noticed an unusually 
good drawing etched into the desk where he was sitting, and produced an 
appreciative image in return. At the next class, he was pleased to 
discover a response in kind. Over a period of months, the drawings 
became more and more elaborate and coded, until Kenny finally dared a 
further step: he sketched the portrait of the other boy, whom he 
suspected he knew from the comics store, and received a sketch of 
himself back. But when they meet one day at the school's metal detector, 
Kenny--for reasons that he cannot understand--finds himself unable to 
meet the boy's eyes. His ambivalence about this relationship becomes one 
of the forces that will drive the novel to its inexorable conclusion.

"A child's world is a ripe grape waiting to be tasted," Lorraine thinks 
at one point. "The real meanings of words, the weight of consequences, 
adulthood, with all its responsibilities and implications, is as 
impenetrable to a child as martian trigonometry." Many of the novel's 
characters are children on the cusp of adulthood, waiting for the moment 
of possibility that will launch them over the hurdle of the present and 
into the future. They still cling to the teenager's conviction that it 
is better to make something, anything, happen than to worry about what 
that something should be. But the world of the novel's children is 
equally impenetrable to the adults, and Lorraine's vision of youth is 
sharply at odds with the way it is experienced by Newell, Kenny, and the 
other disturbed souls they will meet over the course of the night. 
Fleeing a casino cop, they find themselves face to face with the 
homeless teens lining the sidewalk, Daphney among them:

Propped up against the base of the casino wall like an abandoned 
doll, the body was bulky in places, but still frail enough to look as if 
it might be carried along by a good wind. Electricity glossed over its 
mess of hair--kinked and matted strands of indistinct, artificial 
colors, clumped in all directions. Legs and shredded leggings were 
extended outward on a crushed cardboard box, perhaps a series of them.

Through the spaces between the people ahead of him, Kenny could see 
that it was hugely pregnant, stretching out and sticking out of the 
bottom of her tank top, her belly this mass of flesh, rubbery in 
appearance, the color of uncooked bird....

Her arms reached and extended upward. Fingers danced, squalid with 
steel skulls and python rings. 

"Spare some change for some ketamine," she said.

Bock's style is muscular and impersonal, ranging in tone from sardonic 
(a soda is "sixty-four ounces of caffeinated carbonation") to euphoric. 
Though he sometimes overdoes the chilliness and the de-personalization, 
here it works to great effect: to the boys, Daphney seems sub-human, a 
piece of refuse left on the street. (The ghoulish-looking Lestat, who 
plays a sly trick on Newell, is even more appalling.) But a few pages 
later we see her again through the eyes of another character, a skinhead 
teenager who is always called only 

"the girl with the shaved head": "like a sprinkle of pepper atop an egg, is how she phrased it." 

Horrified by Daphney's condition--the girl glimpses her trying to get 
high on cough syrup--she is nonetheless kind enough to ask gently, 
"Should you be doing that?" As they talk, Daphney brags about her milk 
carton, and the girl with the shaved head asks to see it:

Swollen and grime-laden hands bloomed, each steel-covered finger 
turning alive, adding interpretive pantomimes to the performance, 
becoming as agitated as Daphney's voice: "What happened was, we didn't 
have no place to put the milk and it went bad and so they made me throw 
it out. But then I kept some of the cartons, you know, stored pens and 
lighters and birthie stuff in some. The others I just folded up. But 
then, I was supposed to go base with these fuckwads right? ... That's a 
total different story. Anyways, my shit got jacked. "

Disco ball refractions formed a kaleidoscope across Daphney's 
profile, imbuing her face with a pattern of small, almost translucent 
snowflakes. To the girl with the shaved head she appeared beautiful and 
full of pain and beautiful for all her pain. The girl wanted to cover 
her and protect her. For an instant, she thought of taking her back home.

"I went to the stores," Daphney said, "but the cartons had all 
different kids."

Her voice then became quiet, cracking as she whispered, "I couldn't 
find me no more."

A lopsided fun cup emerged from her lap. Shaking away the memory, 
Daphney reached for passing tourists. 

"Please spare some change for some low-grade ketamine."

Lest we choke with sentiment, Bock quickly returns this reverie to earth 
with the revelation of exactly why Daphney has been desperately waiting 
for another girl to come along: not because she longs for female 
company, but because she needs help to re-screw one of her genital 
piercings. Yet the shift in perspective has served its purpose by 
humanizing Daphney, putting a face on "this mass of flesh." Much later, 
the novel will ask its reader to make the same shift with respect to the 
repulsive Lestat, who is suddenly revealed as a beleaguered and lonely 
boy rejected by a series of runaway girls, a boy who longs for 

"someplace safe and warm" so that he can "write a book that would change the world."

Though Beautiful Children is clearly sympathetic to the runaway's sense 
of infinite possibility--the notion that in a single moment one's path 
can be altered, that anything can happen--it does not quite romanticize 
life on the street. A relentlessly grim picture comes from Lestat, who 
wears two pairs of socks to avoid getting blisters. He has chronic skin 
rashes from not bathing. His fingers become "so caked in dirt that he 
had to stop brushing his teeth with them." He suffers from diarrhea and 
at one point has to use his sock as toilet paper. And like many 
runaways, he eventually finds himself turning tricks for food: 

"When Lestat fell to his knees he felt like he was betraying everything he knew about himself, and at the same time it was a very logical decision. Lestat needed money to eat. He needed money to live. There was a chance he'd get taken to an apartment where he could get a shower."

Beautiful Children has been discussed as a novel about runaways. But it 
is also, even more darkly and more importantly, a novel about 
pornography and prostitution, those twin pillars that together support 
what is euphemistically known as the "adult entertainment industry." 

Bock seems to know this world: the "small and windowless storefront," 
its parking lot blinded by a cinderblock wall, where an Arab immigrant 
mops the stalls in which the men watch their videos; the strip clubs 
where "champagne dances" are done with apple juice; the nondescript 
office where the videos are made, with a syringe of "instant wood" on 
hand for backup. Every man in the novel is somehow implicated in the 
porn industry--the question is how deeply. Are they just lonely, like 
Bing, a comic book artist who visits a strip club after Kenny is the 
only fan to show up for his book-signing at the comics shop? Are they 
apparently ordinary guys like Lincoln, who turns to watching porn on his 
office VCR to forget the troubles in his marriage? Or is it their life, 
as is the case for Ponyboy, the porn video bike messenger, and his 
stripper girlfriend, picturesquely named Cheri Blossom?

At Ponyboy's instigation, Cheri has transformed her body with what must 
be the world's most astonishing set of breast implants: as the climax to 
her act, she packs her hollowed-out nipples with candle wax and wicks, 
and sets them on fire for a lucky patron to blow out. (She has also 
sculpted her pubic hair into a heart-shaped bull's eye, highlighting the 
layers with different colors of tattoo ink.) A surrealist turn in an 
otherwise realist fiction is often more bewildering than enlightening; 
but in Bock's Las Vegas, it is exactly the right touch. If a stripper 
anywhere were to have flaming nipples, it would be in this spectacle of 
excess: 

"The neon. The halogen. The viscous liquid light.... The twenty-four-hour bacchanal. The party without limits. The crown jewel of a country that has institutionalized indulgence."

Ponyboy, the kind of boyfriend who sends his girl flowers paid for with 
a stolen credit card, has higher aspirations for Cheri. The sequence in 
which he convinces her to make a porn video, and what happens at the 
shooting, contains some of the more harrowing fictional moments in 
recent memory. Reproducing his son's image on hundreds of fliers, 
Lincoln remembers the Native American superstition that photography 
steals the soul; pornography represents the ultimate vindication of that 
belief. What could be more soul-destroying, Cheri will wonder, than 
having sex on camera? Yet the novel also reveals the thorough 
routinization of what has become the most institutionalized of 
indulgences. 

"Porn's not just a guilty pleasure for the raincoat crowd, not no more,"