The New York Times-20080127-What Happened in Vegas Stayed in His Novel

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127

What Happened in Vegas Stayed in His Novel

Full Text (5154  words)[Author Affiliation] Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The New York Times.

Charles Bock, whose first novel, Beautiful Children, comes out on Tuesday, used to be one of the horde of struggling, would-be writers who still flock to New York, even though novel-writing isn't what it used to be. They hang on because every now and then a first-timer -- a Colson Whitehead, a Zadie Smith, a Gary Shteyngart -- hits the jackpot and makes the game seem worth staying in for just a little longer. You can spot them in coffee shops in Brooklyn and the West Village, clicking away on their laptops -- when they're not wasting time on Gawker, that is. You also see them at readings at Housing Works, KGB Bar and the Half King, dressed in black, leaning forward intently and sometimes venturing to ask a probing question. They idolize Lethem, Chabon, Eggers. They study The New Yorker religiously so that they can complain about how predictable the fiction is.

Bock worked for 11 years on Beautiful Children and lived for most of that time in a tiny one-bedroom Gramercy Park-area apartment that used to belong to Mary-Beth Hughes, who made a minor splash a half-dozen years ago with her debut novel, Wavemaker II. The place is a classic first novelist's apartment: leaky faucet, brick wall, rock posters, desk made of a shelf and some dinged-up filing cabinets. For a while Bock, who is now 38, a little old to be a first novelist, charged his groceries on his girlfriend's credit card, and he rarely bought new clothing, making do with vintage rock T-shirts he collected in college. To pay the rent, he temped, worked as a researcher and a legal proofreader and ghost-edited Shaquille O'Neal's autobiography, Shaq Talks Back. He also did a very unhappy stint as a rewrite man at a supermarket tabloid. But mostly he avoided steady work whenever he could, much to his parents' concern.

Beautiful Children has already generated an unusual amount of buzz for a first novel. Near-genius, A. M. Homes has called it, and it made No. 53 on Esquire's latest list of the top 100 things you need to know about. The jacket -- an indicator often of the degree of enthusiasm a publisher feels -- has a surfeit of embellishments: uncoated stock, embossed letters, glittering foil. But Bock has been around long enough, attending writing programs, giving readings, publishing in small magazines, that he has established a small network of literary connections, mostly of writers who have also struggled to make their way in New York, and he knows that even good novels often fail to sell. There were moments during those 11 years when he stopped going out much and came close to losing heart. At a certain point, if people at parties asked me what I did, I stopped saying I was a writer, he said recently. Because at this age how can you say that if you don't have a book?

Bock grew up in Las Vegas, where each of his parents runs a pawnshop. He was visiting them the week before Christmas, and when I flew out to see him, I found myself thinking that though the city is hardly known as a novelists' spawning ground, perhaps all the struggling, would-be writers should consider relocating themselves there. As Bock writes in Beautiful Children: Was there any way to jump-start a libido quicker? Any other place on the planet that instantly offered the chance to reverse fortune and end losing streaks, the chance to set right a lifetime of disappointments?

The air was clear; the sun glinted off the mountains. On the street, some very friendly guys were handing out little cards promising me that in 15 minutes or less, and for a very reasonable sum, young women named Sloane, Lana or Roxanne could show up in my room for conversation and massage. That room, in the shiny black pyramid at the Luxor, with hieroglyphics decorating the TV console, cost only $60 a night. Some of the food was a little pricey -- 140 bucks for Kobe beef in the downstairs steakhouse -- but there was a McDonald's conveniently open 24 hours a day, not far from the life-size replica of King Tut's Tomb. Also open 24 hours, of course, were the gaming tables, where just a few well-placed chips could earn an aspiring author the equivalent of a nice advance, and for the unlucky there was plenty of moonlighting work as far as I could see. Cabdrivers in Vegas get $25 for not much more than taking you around the block, and while raking in some of my misplaced chips, a craps dealer explained to me that on good nights a personable dealer can make $500 in tips, or tokes, as he called them.

And then there is the city itself, desert home of the immortals: Bugsy, Sammy, Frank, Dean, Joey, Wayne, Barry, Celine, Siegfried and Roy and the cats. The rain forest at the Mirage; the indoor jousting arena at Excalibur; the replica of the Grand Canal snaking beneath imitation Tiepolo clouds in the mall of the Venetian; the Liberace Museum, repository of the Maestro's capes and furs; the doppelganger versions of the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. You can't make this stuff up, as they say in writing school -- the whole world reproduced in just a few crowded blocks. Vegas may be a cliche, but it's a cliche on steroids -- phoniness cultivated with a staggering amount of care and money. I found myself wondering, in fact, why there have been so few Las Vegas novels and why the best of them until now, John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, was so narrow and depressed.

Las Vegas is a great place to be from, not to live in, Charles Bock told me firmly, and he added that for a long time he tried not to write about his hometown. But unavoidably, Las Vegas is both the setting and, in a way, the subject of Beautiful Children. The book began as a short story set in the arcade rotunda at Circus Circus -- a writing-school experiment that involved switching points of view every paragraph or so -- and then turned into a novella, as Bock tried to slow down and unpack what he had written, before finally expanding into a novel. For a while, like Vegas itself, it had no sure sense of direction but wouldn't stop growing.

The book includes some memorable evocations of the Strip, like this description of the nighttime sky:

The neon. The halogen. The viscous liquid light. Thousands of millions of watts, flowing through letters of looping cursive and semi-cursive, filling then emptying, then starting over again. Waves of electricity, emanating from pop-art facades, actually transforming the nature of the atmosphere, creating a mutation of night, a night that is not night -- daytime at night.

But for the most part the Las Vegas of Beautiful Children is not tourists' Las Vegas but the city of the people who live and work there -- a place that is and is not like lots of other places in America, with sprawling neighborhoods of tract houses and subdivisions, where the sun bounces off tile roofs and at nighttime the sprinkler heads pop out of the ground, keeping the grass as green as Astroturf. The difference is that half the people who work here work in the gaming industry, one way or another, and the other half patronize it, and there is about the whole place an air of boom and bust, of glittering insubstantiality.

Bock's book is not directly about gaming, though -- the way that, say, Dostoyevsky's novella The Gambler, set in fictional Roulettenburg, is. Beautiful Children centers on 12-year-old Newell Ewing, the geeky, troubled son of a former showgirl and an ex-minor-league ballplayer now working for a casino, who disappears into the desert one night, leaving his parents grief-stricken and trying to cling to an already fragile marriage. Woven into the Ewings' story, and sometimes intersecting with it, are the accounts of a host of other characters: a weird and lonely older boy who befriends Newell and chauffeurs him around; a would-be comic-book artist and video-game addict with the unfortunate, overly jazz-inflected name of Bing Beiderbixxe; a stripper whose chief talent is lighting her nipples on fire; her sleaze-ball boyfriend, who is trying to pimp her into the porn business; some punkish, drugged-out high-school kids; a pregnant homeless girl with a fondness for meth; a vampirish hustler named (naturally) Lestat; and some assorted runaways and their heartbroken families.

Summarized like this, Beautiful Children sounds grimmer than it is, not that it's exactly cheerful. But it's also a love story of sorts, or a story of love gone wrong -- of chances missed, connections not made -- and Bock manages to invest it with a surprising amount of feeling, not least in the scenes between Lincoln and Lorraine, Newell's mom and dad, each trying to cope with the corrosive pain of a child's disappearance. What distinguishes the book from most debut efforts is the grandness of its ambition. It's a first novel that wants to read like the work of someone at the peak of his career, and it has an almost Dickensian amplitude -- overamplitude, some critics may say -- of subplot and detail; it's one of those novels that strive to be much more than the sum of their parts, and in which the writing is not always averse to showing off a little.

One morning, Bock gave me a tour of the touristy Vegas, the one that is largely absent from his book. We drove around for a bit in his mother's Hyundai, whose trunk he had already managed to crease by backing into a Dumpster, and we walked the Strip for a couple of hours, along with legions of other sightseers. These days, Bock cultivates a rocker's look: black jeans and jacket, concert T-shirt, chains, medallions, ropey bracelets. He has long, center-parted hair and six tattoos, including two in honor of the book and one that displays the letters of the alphabet circling his left arm, in the place where you might normally expect to see barbed wire. But the whole effect is somewhat undone by his habitual expression, which is sweetly innocent, even a little goofy sometimes. He is not much better at pedestrian navigation than at driving, and he sideswiped me a couple of times as we threaded our way through some casinos. Once or twice I lost him, because he had stopped to give some homeless man, whom he invariably addressed as sir, a dollar or two.

Standing on a skywalk -- one of the overpasses that carry foot traffic over the Strip -- and pointing out the sights, he reminded me of a slightly absent-minded professor discussing a lost civilization. The Strip that Bock grew up with is being rapidly bulldozed, or blown up, to make room for a new one, and the old Rat Pack Vegas now exists mostly as a litany of legendary, vanished nightspots: the Sands, the Hacienda, the Desert Inn. Bock showed me the sites of some recent implosions: the Dunes, demolished in the early '90s to make way for the Bellagio; El Rancho, formerly the Thunderbird, which came down in 2000; the Stardust, expanded in 1991 and reduced to rubble last March; the New Frontier, dynamited in November to make room for a replica of the Plaza Hotel in New York. Pointing to the old casino's famous F sign, still standing, Bock said: I can't believe it. They just blew it up, the Frontier, the way they blew up the Stardust, where my parents had their honeymoon. Off to the north, he showed me, was the tentlike roof of Circus Circus, the first of the family-themed hotel-casinos, where he sometimes went as a kid; in the near distance were the Mirage and Treasure Island, home of the warring pirate ships (in dry dock, sadly, over the Christmas holiday); and behind us were the Luxor, Excalibur and the Mandalay Bay. The Strip is swelling outward to the south, toward the airport, he explained, with the resorts growing ever bigger and more gimmicky. They're all variations on a theme, he said, and I wonder what's next. I keep waiting for the Fatherland.

As we wandered around, Bock reminisced a little about the old days. At one point his father dealt craps at the old MGM Grand, which had a movie theater in the arcade level. The four Bock children used to go there on weekends to eat candy, watch old movies, play air hockey. During the '80s, when so many great prizefights took place in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace, his father would pile the family into the car, and they cruised back and forth on the freeway, which runs right behind Caesars, listening to the bouts on the radio. But in brand-new Vegas, Bock sometimes seemed as disoriented as I was. We got hopelessly lost in the Forum Shops, a megamall attached to Caesars Palace, trying to find the casino's famous talking statues. I always thought of Caesars as the gold standard, he told me. I had exactly one date in high school, and my father knew someone who got us comped here for the Sammy Davis Jr. show. We heard 'Candy Man,' 'Mr. Bojangles' -- the whole list. And then my date and I went off to the dance -- homecoming, I think -- where she pretty much ignored me. But I remember it was a phenomenally good show, totally worth it.

Then we got in the car and headed north, across Sahara Avenue, the invisible boundary separating the Strip from the Las Vegas of wedding chapels, motels, cheesy furniture stores, bail bondsmen and auto-body shops. Up here is the Fremont Street area, which is where Bock's parents have their shops. Fremont Street is Las Vegas's historic district, or the closest the city has to one, the site of many of the oldest casinos and hotels, including the Golden Gate, which goes back to 1906, the Golden Nugget and Binion's, former home of the World Series of Poker. As the Strip has grown, Fremont has declined, and in 1995 the city fathers tried to arrest the slide by erecting a curved metal canopy over several blocks, turning them into a pedestrian mall. At night the roof turns into a giant L.E.D. screen with a light show that features, among other things, aliens, interplanetary explosions, flying jets and the American flag. There are outdoor entertainments -- spray-can artists, a booth where you can have your picture taken with a Chippendales dancer, strolling musicians like Carl Ferris, better known as Safe Sax. Over Christmas there was a five-person ice show, skating on a rink the size of a living-room rug.

Fremont Street is appealingly funky, an authentic place in a way the Strip is not, but it also feels a little tired and run-down. The strippers here will never make it in the high-end, warehouse-size bars over on Industrial Avenue and try to compensate with excessive friendliness. Most of the casinos haven't been remodeled in ages and give off a permanent whiff of stale cigarette smoke; some of the slot machines are so old that instead of beeping and printing out your winnings on a little bar-code slip, they still rain nickels into a clinking metal cup. The clientele is noticeably older and less well heeled than it is up on the Strip. They appreciate the 99-cent margaritas and the deep-fried Twinkies, line up for the $6.99 prime-rib buffet and when they get strapped some of them no doubt head over to the Ace Loan Company, Mrs. Bock's pawnshop, which used to be right on Fremont and is now on North Third Street, across from the Lady Luck. Mr. Bock's place, John's Loan and Jewelry, is a few blocks away in a little Strip mall. It used to be on South First, practically across the street from Ace. This is where the Bock kids would come every day after school, to wait for their parents to finish work. They'd roll quarters, file pawn slips and wait for the theme music from All Things Considered, which came on at 5 o'clock and was the signal to start taking the merchandise out of the front window.

It was Bock's maternal grandfather, Irving Starr, who started the family in the pawn business. Bock's sister, Crystal, remembers him as a big, Vegasy guy, very street-smart, with a huge personality who liked to play the horses. He used to work in New York's Diamond District, on West 47th Street, but by the early 60s, drawn to the action, he had moved out to Vegas and opened Ace Loan. Caryl and Howard Bock, Charles's parents, followed him in the mid-'60s, when Caryl's mother became ill. Caryl taught grammar school for a while and later tried selling Tupperware over the phone; Howard dealt craps and tried to become a screenwriter. At one point, though the movie was never made, he had a script in development about two moths who fall in love while hovering over a craps table and listening to what's being said down below. In the late '70s, Starr helped Caryl and Howard buy John's Loan, and after her father's death, in 1994, Caryl took over his place. Howard still runs John's with the help now of Charles's twin older brothers, Yale and Anthony.

Caryl's shop is the smaller of the two, and a little dingier, but they're both pretty depressing, full of worn-looking stuff that people have left behind: watches, wedding rings and jewelry, war medals, china figurines, golf clubs, fur coats, electric guitars, TVs, DVD players. Browsing there is like dropping in at a ghostly yard sale where every item, you sense, comes with a history you'd just as soon not know about. Caryl Bock, quick and intense, did not strike me as a woman who loved her work. Howard, on the other hand, is a charmer. Standing behind the counter, flanked by his silent, unsmiling sons, who both have advanced degrees and don't appear to be in love with the pawn business, either, he told some yarns -- including one about the night after Charles was born, when he shot lights-out craps at the Castaways and made enough to pay the hospital bill -- and gave me a quick run-through of the pawn business. Most of his customers come from Southern California, he explained, and some of them are longtimers who repeatedly hock the same item, redeem it and then pawn it again. They have nothing else to do, he said. It's a way of life. They're looking for get-even money, betting money or getaway money. People need money to get home sometimes. The first thing to go is the wedding band and the last is the .44 Magnum, and then there's everything else in between. Here, look at this. He went into a back room and reappeared with a Thompson semiautomatic machine gun, which he gently placed in my hands.

A shop like Ace Loan, not much disguised, figures in Beautiful Children, and so does a father's story very much like Howard Bock's account of shooting craps the night after his son was born. People who knew Crystal Bock back in the '80s, when she was a wild, blue-haired punk rocker, will recognize her as the inspiration for some of the book's desert-rave scenes. And though Beautiful Children is not autobiographical, Charles is all over the place. There are traces of him in Bing, the yearning, wannabe artist; in Ponyboy, a hustler who loves tattoos; and in Kenny, Newell's mixed-up older friend, whose car is a midden of tangled cassette tapes and fast-food wrappers. And there is a great deal of Charles in Newell, angry, misunderstood, miserable in his own skin.

I never ran away, he said. But I was very unhappy as a teenager. I felt like a complete nonentity, and I very tangibly have memories of not wanting to be here -- in my body. So the idea of just disappearing isn't much of a stretch. He added: Was it me or was it growing up in Las Vegas? That's a good question. I think the idea of this city influences you whether you like it or not. I also know that my parents' being pawnbrokers has probably influenced me in all kinds of ways, though when you're a kid you just accept your own reality -- you don't think it's weird at all. I remember when I was in the second grade my father brought home from the shop a stereo system that fit into a little suitcase. How great was that? The only thing that was a little odd was that my parents told us when people asked what they did for a living, we shouldn't say they were pawnbrokers. We should say, 'Our parents are in sales.'

Crystal Bock, two years younger than Charles, is now an actress in New York and remains close to her brother, whom she considers her best friend. She remembers the Bock household as very loving but occasionally fraught from the pressure of her parents' jobs. They worked seven days a week and took off only Jewish holidays. We were like pioneers, she told me. We didn't even see our relatives that much. Growing up, she said, Charles had a dark, depressive and caustic side that took him until well into adulthood to mostly grow out of, and to this day he is the one member of the family who will call out the others on behavior he considers inappropriate. He was always the difficult one, she said, and he had a mouth on him. Some of his unhappiness, she guessed, came from being outshone by his older brothers. They were very much into sports, she said, and he desperately wanted to be, too. But he just didn't have the body. He was always small and skinny. On the other hand, she added, his whole life, everything he did, he did 2,000 percent. He wrote pamphlets for his synagogue youth group; he obsessed about comics and his collection of Star Wars figures. When he decided to take up boxing as an 8-year-old, he sewed his own trunks of satin from his sister's dance costumes. Later he became a student of heavy metal -- the kind of person who still remembers the opening acts of every Black Sabbath concert he ever attended. It's been such an amazing journey for Charlie, and he had a lot of stuff to work through, Crystal said. But I'm not surprised he wound up doing something great.

Though obviously bright, Bock was so miserable in school that he did poorly. He told me, The only memorable thing that happened to me in high school was that in algebra once, someone threw a pencil and it got stuck in my forehead and drew blood. He went to Whittier College -- Richard Nixon's alma mater and also Bing Beiderbixxe's -- because he couldn't get in anywhere else, he says, and though by then a passionate reader of sports journalism, he got through his English classes mostly with the help of Cliffs Notes. I remember thinking, Oh, that book sounds pretty good -- maybe I should read it someday, he said. It wasn't until after graduation, while he was selling clothing in a rock-music store in Los Angeles, that Bock really discovered fiction, and he began a crash course in contemporary writing, following a trail of blurbs. If someone on the jacket recommended a book Bock liked, then he would immediately read the recommender's books. Rick Moody's Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven made a huge impression, and so did David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Those writers lead to William Vollmann and Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen and in turn to older writers like John Barth, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver and to some of Bock's near-contemporaries: Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, A. M. Homes. I discovered there was all this good stuff out there, he said, and as I began to try to write, it completely changed the way I thought about character and how I was going to address the city I grew up in.

Beautiful Children was bought by Random House in 2006 for a sum that Bock's agent, Jim Rutman, says was just into six figures -- not a huge payday for so many years of work. A year before that, when Bock and his wife, Diana Colbert, married, they thought that by then he'd have an advance that would help pay for their wedding. They went ahead with the ceremony anyway, even though Charles realized he still had more to do. I had to borrow his computer once, Diana recalled recently, and I saw a folder labeled, 'Another Summer of Rewrites.' It broke my heart.

What took Bock so long? For one thing, his ambitions got in the way. They were so large, it took the book a while to catch up, and to judge from what others say, Bock, still dark and caustic on occasion, had some personal maturing to do as well. There were four major drafts, not to mention endless fussing over transitions as the book toggled between so many characters and between two separate time frames -- the events leading up to Newell's disappearance and then his parents' efforts to find him. The first version, Bock says, was too flashy and self-conscious. The second had all the characters and most of the themes in place, but when Bock showed it to a few people, the response wasn't even close to what he had hoped. One agent told him, I don't care about these people.

Rick Moody, who taught Bock in the summer writing program at Bennington College and has since become a friend, recalls that when he saw an early draft of Beautiful Children in the mid-'90s: Charles was swinging for the fences. He thought big, but he didn't have the chops yet. There was an awesome amount of narrative -- a lot of would-be Foster Wallace. So a lot of what Charles had to do was scaling back, and he did such great work with the revisions. He was really, really patient with the rewriting, and it can't have been easy. One of his friends is Jonathan Safran Foer, and so while Charles is still working, still revising, he gets to watch 'Everything Is Illuminated' zip up the best-seller lists.

Another student in Moody's summer workshop was Alison Smith, who later published the memoir Name All the Animals. She, too, became a friend of Bock's and recalled recently that when they first met he was going through a temporary clean-cut phase. He had short hair then and wore clean T-shirts, though he did have a pair of hot leather pants, she said. He had incredible vision, an incredible belief in himself, she went on. He feels things so deeply, but back then he hadn't completely figured out how to build those feelings into the writing. Bock has very committed feminist politics, she explained, and they sometimes got in the way of his writing about the Las Vegas porn industry. Some of the scenes were too angry and one-dimensional, she said. He needed to step more deeply inside his female characters, so they weren't just victims.

The first writing of Bock's that his wife ever read was an early version of a scene in Beautiful Children, in which a homeless woman drops her clitoris ring in a public-toilet stall. The first sentence was god-awful, she said, sitting with Bock in their apartment a couple of nights after he got back from Vegas. I thought, Oh no, I've met this cute guy and he writes like this. She added: Everybody's girlfriend thinks her boyfriend is writing a great book. Nobody takes it seriously. I never doubted Charles's book, but sometimes I doubted the breaks. Things can be good in this world and still fail.

After his agent sent the last draft of Beautiful Children out to some publishers, Bock recalled, there was a period when he didn't sleep for 72 hours. I thought, If this book doesn't sell, I'm going to Bellevue, he said. I felt like someone who had been building a bomb in the basement for 11 years, and it was a good question whether or not it was going to blow up in my face. He added later in an e-mail message: I wanted a book that would read like it had always existed, like all the structural pieces were exactly where they should be. But in the process, I drove myself nuts.

Bock's close friend, the critic Wyatt Mason, told me: I think Charles had some things to do as a man before he could come to his subject matter. He had to grow up, as we all do. In most respects, Bock and Mason couldn't be less alike. Mason is a New Yorker, educated at Fieldston and Penn and literary in an almost professorial way. He has translated Rimbaud for the Modern Library series and won a National Magazine Award for his reviews and criticism. He met Bock at a writers' colony in Wyoming in 2001, when neither of them had published much. Charles was the guy in the Megadeth T-shirt, he recalled. He was kind of a brash presence. He had opinions about everything, and he advertised his enthusiasms with a lot of passion. But he and Bock discovered that we shared the nerdy past of boys who grow up to be writers, Mason went on to say. We both had a passion for comic books -- for so many of us that's the marijuana that led to the hard stuff. Back in New York, he and Bock took to phoning each other late at night, at 3 in the morning sometimes, and in conversations that could last for hours, they sustained each other through the lonely business of learning to be a writer.

Charles spent 11 years trying to manifest a single vision on the page, with almost no support, Mason said. He's totally committed to writing -- it's his whole life. His passions have sometimes led him to extremes, but where most people tend as they age to grow set in their ways, he's become more flexible. He's still extremely opinionated, but he also has the desire to be a decent human being. I think he's learned to balance his capacity for great passion with a capacity for empathy, and that's what you see in the book.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: THE OTHER STRIP: Bock's parents, Caryl and Howard Bock, outside the Ace Loan Company, one of the two pawnshops they own in Las Vegas. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC OGDEN; ANGIE SMITH/REDUX, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)