What Happened in Vegas Stayed in Vegas His Novel

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.

Charles Bock, the son of Las Vegas pawnbrokers, tried not to write about his hometown but couldn’t leave it behind. The result is one of the most-anticipated debut novels in years.

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.

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 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 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 0 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 doppelgänger 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 cliché, but it’s a cliché 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:

Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The New York Times.