The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Boot Club. I'm June Thomas.

Today our boot club members are discussing Charles Box's new novel, Beautiful Children.

To introduce the conversation, here's

Stephen Metcalf. Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm Stephen Metcalf, Slate's

critic at large. I'm joined this morning by Katie Roifey, author most recently of Uncommon

Arrangements and a teacher slash professor at NYU. Katie, welcome. Thank you. And we're also joined by Troy Patterson,

who is the television critic for Slate. Troy, I believe this is your first audiobook club,

and you've asked us to be gentle with you this morning. Please do. We'll try. We'll try. Charles

Bach is now 38 years old, which depending on your point of view, is either young or old. He did take 11 years to produce his first novel, Beautiful Children, which draws upon his experience as a child of Las Vegas, specifically a child of a couple who were pawnbrokers. And he saw the squalor and degradation of Las Vegas as a matter

of daily routine growing up in the shadow of the casinos. His book is big, it's long, it's sprawling.

It has been considered an important debut, we should say, by the New York Times, which treated

it three times over. I think once extremely enthusiastically, once fairly enthusiastically, and once

with some reservations. I thought maybe before we got into our discussion, I would give people who

haven't read it or haven't read it recently a taste of the flavor of the book. It's a very flavorful,

it's a powerful, you know, sort of powerfully written book. And I thought I'd start with an early passage.

There's a character named Bing. Much of the book is taken up with the kind of young,

adolescent, male imagination and how overcrowded it is with video games and violence and comic

books. And Bing is now, I believe, in his early 20s. He's a comic book artist of very little renown. He goes on

these kind of slightly pathetic book tours, the most recent of which lands him in Las Vegas.

There's a long section describing Bing's sort of what would you call it, his Kunstler-Roman

or something, the story of his development as a would-be comic book artist. This is on page 16. He collected every

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