Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children, takes readers into a thoroughly unglamorous Las Vegas, one of pawn shops, teen runaways and an exploitative sex industry. He spoke to Publishers Weekly about the mythical city and his long struggle to finish his novel.
Beautiful Children is your debut novel. How long has it been in the works?
It took me a good 10 years to write, nine years with no agent. I had a string of really awful jobs in Manhattan where my whole point was to do as little work in the world as possible so I could hoard time to write. All the while I felt like, “Oh, I’m building this bomb in the basement.”
Did you always know you were going to use your childhood hometown of Las Vegas as a setting?
When I was in grad school, I wrote one early story that was Vegas, and then I stayed away from it. I was trying to expand and do different things. I knew I would write about it, but I stayed away for as long as I could. This novel started as a short story, and it was a first attempt to do something set in Las Vegas—and it just was an awful short story. Then it became a novella and it was still not right for a million reasons, but I stayed with it. It kept growing, and I kept evolving as a writer.
Do you think readers will be surprised by how Beautiful Children’s vision of Vegas differs from the glitzy Vegas that’s depicted on film and television?
I had not thought of that. I do think that people go to Las Vegas for “whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” They go for the spectacle. One thing I’ve always been aware of because I grew up there is that I’d always been around the other side of that image of the city. The book’s roots really lay in my parents’ pawnshop, the things I saw as a child. I hope it can be eye-opening, but not in an exploitative way.
How do you feel about the buzz you’re getting, with writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and A.M Homes blurbing the book?
Most of those people are such wonderful writers on their own that for them to take the time to read and think that I did something good is really exciting. Because I had that sense of “it’s never going to be finished, it’s never going to be published, and if it is, who even will see it?” It gives me this great unbelievable freedom to go for the limits of what I can do, try to stretch the idea of what you can make a novel be. It’s amazing to me that it’s over.
