David Thomson

Standard Operating Procedure
By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
The Penguin Press, 286 pages, $25.95

Standard Operating Procedure—the film—is a mannered, stealthy web, the product of an artful, rather self-important yet depressed spider who sees Abu Ghraib prison as the obligingly ambivalent provocation for "an Errol Morris picture."  read more »

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN
By Charles Bock
Random House, 432 pages, $25

There’s a lot of noise already about Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children. It was there already before I began reading. I was at liberty to go to the book’s Web site, the sheer empty-headed monotony of which at last drove me to start reading the book itself. As I advanced, I saw (in Interview magazine, its “Falling in Love With America All Over Again” special issue) that Mr. Bock’s parents owned a pawnshop in Las Vegas, which gave the kid access to all that city’s wonders. The same promo (it’s called Writer Spotlight, but it’s an ad) shows Mr. Bock as a nerdy-looking dude who can be made cool in the right lighting and the right clothes (blazer by Boss Selection, shirt by Boss Black, jeans by 7 For All Mankind). Mr. Bock stands there in the picture trying to be helpless or looking like a suspect in a police lineup. But he looks too smart to be so foolish. Surely he knows he’s been styled by James Worthington Demolet, just as he has lent himself to the notion that Beautiful Children is a buzz book instead of just a buzz.  read more »