'Beautiful Children' by Charles Bock and 'The Delivery Man' by Joe McGinniss Jr.
BOOK REVIEW
The sordid world of Sin City's lost kids
LIVE in Las Vegas long enough and you'll realize it's built on false hope. Certainly, the games of chance are a loser's folly, but so too are the master-planned excess of Summerlin, the cookie-cutter streets of Green Valley and Henderson. And in between the sprawl is the reason anyone knows about the place at all: the narrow casino canyon of Las Vegas Boulevard, which winds through glamour and glut until it stops at the sea of rugged humanity known as downtown. It's no small wonder that the city was founded by gangsters and that its current mayor is a former mob attorney. The entire city is the vig.
Yet for all of its potential, literature hasn't captured Vegas in a truly convincing fashion, with itsunchecked decadence, sex as voyeuristic sport and, perhaps more frighteningly, the idea that someone, anyone, actually lives in a place where what happens there stays there. All of which makes the debut novels by Charles Bock and Joe McGinniss Jr. so filled with promise.
In "Beautiful Children," Bock attempts not only to take on the very real issue of the runaways peopling the streets of Las Vegas, but also tries to place these children in a larger cultural context. Bock uses both Columbine and Sept. 11 as illustrative background noise, as if to say the reasons children run away don't have to be the clichés of sexual, chemical, physical or psychological abuse (although certainly, the runaways depicted here suffer from those too) but that the world created for them has gone topsy-turvy and that it only makes sense they would try to escape.
Take, for instance, the case of 12-year-old Newell Ewing -- son of casino executive Lincoln and his pinup-looking wife, Lorraine -- who seems to be suffering from an existential angst befitting middle age. After his older, troubled friend Kenny touches him inappropriately during what turns out to be Newell's last good night before disappearing, he dips into thoughts that feel far more authorial than character-driven: "Whatever response Newell was expecting, it was not coming. The little lesson at the end of the mistake. The attempt to right the ship and get back on course. No assurances from Kenny. No apologies. No arguments. Just Kenny, seething in his seat, not even trying anymore. It was another shattered border between them, one whose dissolution shocked Newell. . . . If he felt bad about anything, it was the hitch that marred his question. Helpless was the last thing Newell was."
