Most young writers can only dream of the buzz being generated by Beautiful Children (John Murray/McArthur & Company), the debut novel of Las Vegas-born, Manhattan-based author Charles Bock. In a lengthy profile in last weekend’s The New York Times Magazine, Bock is warmly welcomed to the literary establishment. The novel, about the hardscrabble lives of Las Vegas misfits and runaways, will also be featured in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review.

The article also confirms Canadian author Stephen Marche’s recent assertion that, in New York, writing is considered a “youthful activity” “ something done in by tattooed, skateboard-toting, young persons. The piece begins with an anthropological-sounding depiction of these curious specimens.

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 himself is described as the embodiment of slacker/literary chic:

[His Manhattan apartment] 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.

Besides sticking it to his parents, Bock had some deeply personal and artistic reasons for writing Beautiful Children, which was 10 years in the making. In an interview with Q&Q contributor Sarah Weinman (appearing in eMusic Magazine), Bock explains why he kept at it:

But writing, as hard as it can be, can also be ecstatically fun. I entertained myself tremendously with this book. It’s very dark, yes, but it’s fun as hell. It quotes kung fu movies, Iron Maiden, Suicidal Tendencies. Lot of good jokes, interesting intellectual questions.