This is how Ron Carlson, author of four novels (most recently Five Skies) and four collections of short stories, characterized the writing in his first book, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, last night at a literary salon moderated by Janet Fitch (Paint It Black, White Oleander). The event, hosted by local press Red Hen at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles's Westwood neighborhood, brought together Carlson, the director of the fiction MFA program at Irvine; first-time novelist Charles Bock (Beautiful Children); and short story writer Greg Sanders to read and discuss literature in front of an audience of mostly writing students.

Now, Carlson said, "I don't want the sentence to call attention to itself, but it needs to carry its own weight." The same goes for the narrative. "I want the story to have a heartbeat more than call attention to itself. ... Over the course of writing short stories, everything moved down in the body—out of the head and down," he said, putting a hand over his heart.

Writing four complete drafts of his first novel over the course of ten years, Bock, a graduate of Bennington's MFA program, suggested this is a lesson he's already learned.

"Early on I was an angry writer," he admitted. "I did very much feel I was taking on the culture." A culture that, in Beautiful Children, includes strippers, pornographers and a gang of street kids. "But when I looked at the people the book was about, these people at the side of the road, that wasn't getting through. You have to care about every single person. They're your babies. Even if you have to send them out into the night to eat poison glowing cows"—a reference to a hilarious parable Carlson read earlier in the evening—"you have to care about them every step of the way."

It was this realization that helped Bock to stick with the project for a decade. "Part of it was to see what frightened me," he said. "And to move forward, to tell it. That sees you through when draft three doesn't work—whether you put it in a drawer and say, 'That's it. I'm a shoe salesman,' or you see if you can figure it out.

"Some things can't be fixed, but I didn't have much else going on. I don't have a rich life."

Paraphrasing Nike, "Just fucking do it," was his final piece of advice.

Caught in the ’Net

I could have used these writing targets oh, say, five years ago.

The Santa Barbara Independent has an expansive feature on Selden Edwards' The Little Book, a fall big book decades in the making. (h/t Liz)

Novelist Herbert Gold speaks with the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about his new memoir, Still Alive!, which recounts his relationships with Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other literary folk.

Finally, trust Radar to ask the tough questions. From an interview with Charles Bock:

I'm actually supposed to ask you about Bennington. Apparently, all of the girls there have claw-shaped vaginas that can recite Andrea Dworkin to the tune of "Old Dixie." Is this true?
That's really, really funny. I don't know if Dworkin might be too outdated now. I can tell you this: During my time in the MFA program, I worked like absolute hell to get laid as much as I possibly could. At no time did any woman's intimate area recite anything to me to the tune of "Old Dixie."

Bing typed in a stream of consciousness, without bothering to read what he was entering, without correcting his errors, leaving alone phrases that he knew were false starts. It was more important to get it all out, get it down.

]A comic book about why grown people read comic books?
TOO VAGUE? 2 OVERDONE? 2 META? DO I NEED MORE SHAPE?

• Different characters have own reasons for being regulars at the comic book store. Group of f/college w/crappy jobs. Stripper who lives in dream world & thinks she's a movie star (remember trip! Sketch when u get home!). Each character MUST have some sort of DEFINING interest in popular culture - movies. rock & roll. Rap. Get rich schemes. Body art. Goth. Tecchie. UFOs. ETC.

It all seems too perfect, but that's really how my weekend at Comic Con started.

I like reading books about cultures I have no direct connection to. This can be evidenced by my bookshelf of Harry Potter, Persian Brides, and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. The latest I've read, Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, falls into the category of "crazy fucked up stories," alongside one of my favorites, SoMa.

What's it about?
These crazy young adults' stories about growing up in Las Vegas. It's crazy. A stripper whose boyfriend wants her to go into porn. His boss is kindly named "Jabba" because he is unreasonably huge and intimidating. And threatens the boyfriend with knife scars and sodomy. They end up at a desert concert with a girl with a shaved head who meets a boy about to run away because his older best friend just made a homoerotic move on him.

It's crazy. There's a lot going on. It's got that disjointed story-ness of Crash or Magnolia, but to me what really sets Bock apart, what earned him a pretty shiny feature in The New York Times, is his flexibility with capturing young voices. He's not nearly as cheesy as some novelists who try to imitate the "lingo" of people ten to twenty years younger than them.

Though Bock largely tackles issues you've probably never dealt with, you trust him as he throws you around the underbelly of Las Vegas. (Not the mafia underbelly part.) One can only wonder what type of research he put into this book. Did he work on a porn shoot? Did he go through a disgruntled marriage? Did he run away from home before graduating high school and trainhop his way into the City of Sin? There are a lot of interesting possibilities here.

Anyway, it's a good book. There are too many plot points to discuss that don't make sense unless you've read the stories that precede them, so I'll just say I liked it. I liked the pace, I liked the writing, and I mostly liked (and appreciate) that I only felt a very nominal tinge of "This guy is writing like a poser." BC is Bock's first novel, and even though I have no credibility in saying what's a good first novel and a bad first novel, I feel like this is  great first novel.

If you're into scratchy looking artwork and seedy places with seedy tattoo parlours, you'll probably like this book.

"On the opposite side of the eight-lane superhighway, their sprint ended at a stretch along the edge of the Circus Circus complex. Here the pedestrian stream thinned, and tourists did what they could to avoid the string of heavily-pierced teenage corpses. Hooligans reclined against the bottom of the casino wall, some pouring condiment packages down their throats, others finger-painting, tracing portraits on the sidewalk with mustard and ketchup. A circle of teenage ghouls were passing a bottle to and fro. Ponyboy spotted the dude with the battery through his nose and immediately left the girl with the shaved head, surprising his buddy with a bear hug and an affectionate cry, COCKSUCKER."

This short story is a good representation of the writing in "Beautiful Children." There are wonderfully descriptive passages that contain a tremendous amount of energy, but occasionally Bock tends to get over descriptive, which saps the prose of its momentum. If you like this story, you'll most likely enjoy the entire book.

The 150-word Review: Charles Bock's Las Vegas is a glittering monument to our society's vapid depravity and it's aversion to anything unpleasantly "real." Underneath the persistent glow of neon, an unfortunate multitude scuffles along unacknowledged, shaped by misfortune, fear, loneliness, and pain.

Bock's novel, "Beautiful Children," is a testament to street kids, littered across pedestrian walkways and side alleys, abandoned to create their own morality. It's also a testament to suburban families, the seemingly lucky ones, who are just as adrift as the rest.

The story's catalyst is the frustratingly inexplicable disappearance of Newell Ewing, a hyperactive 12-year-old obnoxious brat, during one eventful Saturday night. This allows Bock to explore an eclectic lot of lost souls, including: Newell's emotionally paralyzed parents; his artistically talented but painfully introverted older friend; and a grotesquely-enhanced stripper and her boyfriend, a scheming, cocksure veteran street punk. The result is a fast-paced, sometimes cluttered, but ambitiously inspiring debut.

Having this book on your shelf will impress: ex-showgirls and convention sales executives; purveyors of smut and perversion; dirty Goth street urchins; decrepit third-string Rat Packers; the literary cognoscenti; and anyone who's familiar with the fine establishments on Industrial Boulevard.

This book will go great with: a cover charge and a two-drink minimum.

Set the mood with: Viva Las Vegas by Dead Kennedys

Clavinism (stuff that will not make you look cool in a bar): Actually Norm, Charles Bock comes from a family of pawnbrokers who've operated pawnshops in downtown Las Vegas for more than thirty years.

All the characters in Beautiful Children seek means of escape-- if not actually through running away, then through comic books, video games, music, porn. Reading a novel, too, is a form of escapism, and one measure of Bock's great success is that his book allows the reader metaphorically to enact this escape. More than one scene was so terrible to read that I actually cried out, but the pleasures of immersion in this fictional universe are nonetheless so considerable that--like Lincoln watching his porn videos, or Bing presented with Cheri's flaming nipples--you cannot turn away. Indeed, the imaginative world of the novel is so vivid and complete that it is a little dismaying to find, at the very end, the only false note: an appended list of resources and advocacy groups for runaways, as if the subject of the novel were just another issue of the day. A work of fiction is not a position paper, and whatever didactic purpose it serves is finally irrelevant.

Actually, I'm not entirely on board with the complaint with the "resources" section---I suspect the book will have a way of gravitating toward the hands of parents of runaways (if not the runaways themselves), and if the novel has anything to say, it's that every bit helps. I was actually a little more irked by Bock's working runaway statistics into the story, but even there he's lashed it to stories (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) about runaways that are suffused with grit, loss, and deeply black humor---a style you might call Bockian.

I certainly wouldn't call what Bock has done DeLillo-like, as Franklin suggests, if only because DeLillo is the master of the big, widescreen, 35,000-foot view of the world, and though Bock works from multiple perspectives none of them are much higher than a sand dune. But that's fine---I'm not convinced that DeLillo's big-picture ironic portraits are worth imitating anymore, and if Beautiful Children is what we get instead, that trade is more than fair.

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.

Er: it's almost right, but "electricity" feels wrong because it's not electricity but electric light that illuminates hair. This is a microcosm of Beautiful Children: it feels like it should be more right than it is. Clichés distract—someone "was bleeding like a stuck pig" and elsewhere a stripper named Cheri goes on "about character arcs and emotional journeys until the friggin' cows came home." Perhaps this is how the character would think, but the problem of how banal, uneducated characters think and speak versus the literary needs of the author is never really resolved*. If teenagers sound like teenagers they're often boring or vapid; if they sound like adults, they don't sound real. If there is a satisfactory solution to this problem, it is not obvious in Beautiful Children; in other novels it involves a "precocious" or abnormally literary narrator. Instead, Beautiful Children opts for long transcriptions of teenage argot that eventually had me flipping pages in a quest for substance. It was hard enough to find when a character thinks, "You cannot possibly fathom an end to your observations about the status of your physical decline, a final finality. Such things are beyond you, as they are beyond anyone; and yet the evidence permeates your days, unavoidably present, oozing from the southwestern decor of a master bedroom [...]" I can't see Robertson Davies going into such despair. Perhaps John Banville would, but much more artfully.

Banville and Davies, however, wrote many novels over the course of their careers, and, at least in Davies' case, his early novels were not as masterful as his later ones. Beautiful Children is a first novel that Bock says took 11 years to write and, presumably, publish, and I can't help but thinking he would've been better served to finish it or have otherwise built his skills elsewhere. Beautiful Children is not a bad novel and perhaps it is even good, but not 11 years good. It has an admirable range of cultural references, from Blake to The Outsiders (a "young adult" novel assigned to me in middle school) to visual media detritus. Like Richard Price's Ladies' Man, Beautiful Children heralds better things to come. Now that Price comes to mind, Lush Life covers ground not dissimilar from Beautiful Children and does it better. And he wrote it in four years. Bock said Beautiful Childrentook so long because it was an "ambitious book, and I just didn't know what I was doing for a lot of it." Many novels gestate for a long time, and he rattled some off: Catch-22 stayed with me, but there were many others. Alas, I don't think Beautiful Children will have the lasting power of Catch-22 or Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, another superb first novel. And in those novels, I doubt anything is "unceremoniously rejected," as something is at the beginning of 3.3 in Beautiful Children.

Bock seems to have better novels in him; in Seattle, he said, "[Beautiful Children is] a dark book, but I believe the darkness is there to illuminate some of the wonderful parts of humanity [...] also, I think there's some pretty good jokes in there too." There are, and he was wonderfully candid when someone asked why the dialog seemed so good and, by implication, authentic: "I have no idea." Although he elaborated, I suspect the real truth came first. Still, I'm not sure I agree with the premise of the question: sometimes the dialog clicked and sometimes not, like much of the rest of the novel.

In another answer, Bock said he used Ponyboy because he's an "iconic young adult character" and that he intentionally "recycles—Vegas is a place where they fake the Eiffel Tower and the great monuments of the world and turn them into casinos." There is "no end to the uses of pop culture," though he tries not to name drop. The recycling theme is heavy in Beautiful Children and perhaps a topic for some future graduate student. Today, someone looking for pleasure and depth could do worse than Beautiful Children—but they could do better. In "Books Briefly Noted," the New Yorker has its own take on the novel's problems, starting with praise and then moving to: "Yet [Beautiful Children] doesn’t quite achieve its intended emotional resonance; there is too much shaky dialogue and improbable Vegas kitsch (breast implants with candle-wax-filled nipples, for a pyrotechnic striptease), and the boy at the center of the plot is thinly drawn and so obnoxious that his disappearance is not unwelcome." I read "Books Briefly Noted" after writing the first draft of this post, and realized that I structure my commentary the same way the New Yorker did its.

Not so great:  The "Talking Together" bit at the end, which makes me wonder why four authors  are sitting together in the same room if they're not going to engage with each other too much. Much of the conversation is polite and round-table-y, and while I wasn't hoping for a Price-Choi cage match, the energy level doesn't change a whole lot throughout, and one-on-one conversations can be more fun to watch (even if Charlie Rose is the guy doing the interrupting).

A very wise woman once said: If it's for free, it's me. And I have to agree.

Neil Gaiman is offering a free download of American Gods for the next month as well.

A PDF will never be more enjoyable than an actual book in your hands, but I'm liking this trend of free book downloads.

Most of the free downloads I've seen lately are only available temporarily. And because I like to read and I like free, this is the first time I've ever sought out books with a sense of urgency. Often, once a book is published, I know I will most likely be able to find that book whenever I get around to buying or checking it out of the library. Years can pass between a book hitting the shelves and me taking it home. But these downloads are a bone for the curious appetite.

Books are one of my favorite objects in the world, but what I like most about these temporary downloads is that they exist one day--available with a click--and they're gone the next and what remains is the story you read--not the book or the soft pages you wrote notes one minute to forget about the next.

Jim Shepard's 2007 collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, has won the Story Prize.

Interested in reading a novel that's stuffed with mouse-over ads because the authors have put every word up for sale? Your ship has just come in.

Hillary Jordan's Mudbound gets the big push in USA Today.

Charles Bock's Beautiful Children gets the big push from its publisher, Random House, which has made the novel free to download as a PDF until Friday at midnight. The Millions rings up publicist Jynne Martin for details. "If it's good enough for Radiohead it's good enough for us!" Martin exclaims. Hang on: It was good enough for Radiohead because the band has alternate revenue streams (back catalog, touring) and a fan base willing to kick in a few bucks out of sheer loyalty, two things a debut novelist has in short supply. Even so, this is probably a winner, thanks to the tight download window and the PDF format, which is clunky--you can't carry it around with you unless you print out the pages (which is slow with PDFs). Anybody who's seduced by the book online will likely drop money to own it.

It's gimmicky, sure, and I don't know what the publisher's end game is (demonstrate that even netizens occasionally express demand for finer forms of the written word?), but I'll be honest, I downloaded it. And I can't wait to start reading it, if only to be able to put forth an informed opinion about this middle-aged wunderkind everyone's talking about.

Personally, when I'm trying to form a snap judgment about an suspiciously overhyped debut, I skip right to the acknowledgments. The acknowledgments can tell you a lot. F'rinstance:

This novel took a long time to write, and there’s no way I could have completed it without a lot of support. From the bottom of my heart, thanks and praise to:

Buckethead...Slash....Axl Rose.

Guns N' Roses -- bad sign!

....William and Allison Woolston for two of the greatest summers known to man, and the most perfect place to get married that a person could ask for.

Needless hyperbole -- bad sign.

....Pumpkin and Hippolyte.

Friends with amusing names. How droll.

....Messy Stench drew the awesomest flyer in the history of papyrus (her website, craptabulous.com, rules, go visit it).

Two-fer: Funny name and needless hyperbole. Or maybe I'm just jealous of the plug.

....To Mohammed Naseehu Ali, I make a personal promise, one day I will dance and sing for your birthday and you can insult me....Alison Smith is my personal corn muffin and I love her no end.

Jokes to which we are not privy.

[Obligatory faux-ironic gushing over publisher, editor, agent deleted.]

....Mary Beth Hughes not only changed my life, but taught me how grace moves through the world.

I must meet this woman! She is a goddess.

....The Great One.

Jackie Gleason??

....Wyatt Mason possesses the finest mind I’ve ever known; moreover, he is the best friend I’ve ever had.

Risky -- this could come as an unpleasant surprise to the many wonderful people previously mentioned.

[Sister, wife, parents, blahbiddy-blah.]

So, that gives you an idea what we're up against. It doesn't mean the book is bad. It might just mean the author thinks a bit much of himself for having written it.

Here's a link to an NPR story on Bock.

* In a rare bit of non-book related news, I have to issue a warning: if you're thinking about saving $20 a month on Internet access through the aptly named Clearwire, don't. I say "aptly," though I mean that rather than having a "clear" meaning "free of any obstructions or unwanted" connection, you'll have a "clear" as in "frequently does not exist" connection. I made the mistake of ditching cable only to find that Clearwire's transfer rates in the middle of Seattle, where their coverage is supposed to be phenomenally good, are awful—and often border on dial-up.

(Posting will be light today, as I'm managing a couple of deadlines and the obnoxious wintry mix that hit the D.C. area last night.)

 Ask her a Question or 3 about anything writerly, and keep going back for her interviews with writers, tips on  the writing life, contests,  and news and views from her unique perspective.

This week she shares with us a new internet TV show by a couple of experienced documentary filmmakers called Titlepage  (now there's an idea!) for and about writers . Featured in the New York Times, the first week will feature Richard Price, Susan Choi and Charles Bock are slated for the first episode. Price's book Clockers was made into a Spike Lee movie in 1995 with Harvey Keitel and John Turturro and will be released in March. Choi and Bock both have books out in January. Read Amy's blog for more details.

Punk god and motormouth champion of the people Henry Rollins talks to The Guardian.

PopSugar asks a very pertinent question: Is Katherine Heigl really the most desirable of all the fair maidens in the land?

A favour to all as those most Spicey of Girls cancel some dates.

I keep on hearing about this book so I thought I should pass on some of the hype.

Francois Vincent takes his chance on McSweeney's to recast articles from Maxim into sociological studies.

Slate asks when America will embrace the genius of Pingu.

Cracked.com has a list of the worst ever half-time performers at the Super Bowl.

The Independent, always so quick to leap upon a rumour, thinks Daniel Day Lewis might win an Oscar...

USA Today is looking forward to eight movies that this link will list for you.

Harp is loving the new folky Goldfrapp.

Many are excited about the xBox 360 release for Rez 3D.

Financial Times profiles James Wood. The critic was no fan of D.C., which was home to his long-time outlet, the New Republic, before he recently jumped to the New Yorker:

“It’s a dead place,” says Wood. “Unless you are going to conquer it like something out of a Balzac novel, or climb the political world, it’s dead, totally dead.”

The article also includes some of Wood's more pointed assessments, like his take on Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full:

Unfortunately, Wolfe’s characters only feel one emotion at a time; their inner lives are like jingles for the self. As Picasso had his Blue Period, so Wolfe’s characters have their Angry Period, or their Horny Period, or their Sad Period. But they never have them at the same time, and so the potential flexibility of the stream of consciousness, precisely its lifelike randomness, is nullified.

Theodora Keogh's stepdaughter notes in the comments of my brief item on Keogh's death that the Charlotte Observer piece I pointed to wasn't an obit. True enough: What I linked to was an appreciation. The Observer's obituary was published on Jan. 8. Clearly, I'm not the Keogh expert. Brooks Peters, however, very much seems to be.

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.”

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.

The London Guardian reviews Peter Ackroyd's new biography of Edgar Allan Poe.

Tom Perrotta, whose most recent novel, The Abstinence Teacher, transcends its occasional script-treatment feel, is interviewed by Financial Times. (The book has just come out in the U.K., with a better cover.) I suspect there's a connection between his answer to question about the last book he couldn't finish (Tree of Smoke) and the question about what makes him cross to read ("Novels longer than 500 pages that are more about style than substance.")