Charles Bock's debut novel is a flawed lollapalooza. The verbiage can be dazzling, and his inventiveness seems boundless. Some parts of the book are terrific, suggesting a depth Bock can't sustain throughout.

Others indicate Bock is prone to defaulting to his indisputably well-developed facility. Few characters in "Beautiful Children" are endearing, though many are fascinating. Among the latter:

		"BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN" By Charles Bock Random House ($25)

Las Vegas, the hyperbolic city where anything goes, particularly greed. Bock grew up there. He knows it almost too well.

This novel is about runaways: Adults avoiding responsibility, children unwilling to mature, netherworld losers running away from engagement.

Bock treats that big theme through the story of Newell Ewing, the son of Lincoln and Lorraine Ewing, a couple whose marriage seems stable, at least on the surface. Newell's disappearance frames the book.

Bock guides us between the mainstream world of the Ewing family and the underworld side of Vegas.

Link Ewing's in corporate sales for the Kubla Khan, an imaginary, yet highly plausible, Vegas hotel and Lor's a former chorus girl, now a housewife.

The underside is more compelling, populated by the likes of stripper and would-be porn star Cheri Bloom, her porn courier boyfriend Ponyboy, the "vampire" Lestat, a homeless man, and Kenny, an aspiring comic book artist who may be Newell's only friend.

Bock eventually ties all these characters together, culminating in a phantasmagoric punk-rock concert scene in the desert.

He also attempts to make connections between comics, pornography, homelessness, the withering of a marriage, artistic aspiration, opportunism, a realistic assessment of one's prospects (Ewing was a Major League caliber ballplayer), and the quality of mercy, which, in fact, can be quite strained.

"Beautiful Children" doesn't lack for ambition. It aims to be the Great American Novel, and in some ways, it comes close. Bock drills his feel for anomie deep, and there are scenes -- among the homeless, in the back rooms of the porn industry, in the desert -- of chilling, singular power:

"When you were alone as much as a runaway was, you lived beneath the crushing weight and breadth of a freedom where there was nowhere specific to go, no one to run to or rely on; a freedom without restraint or responsibility, that was both empowered and burdened by the realization that you did not matter," Bock writes in a passage about Lestat.

"If you didn't keep yourself collected, something as random as the bright red innards of road kill could send you spiraling."

Everybody seems on the verge of losing it; Bock could have named this book, "Beautiful Losers." His apprehension of living on the edge is acute, and his characterizations -- from the Jewish pawnbroker in downtown Las Vegas to Jabba, the seedy porn king who can't quite persuade the conflicted Cheri to get dirty with an anonymous "woodman" -- feel earned. Credibility isn't an issue.

But a didacticism underlying some of the characterizations makes "Beautiful Children" a tad preachy, and Bock doesn't develop the comic-book aspect sufficiently.

For example, what, besides his fabulous name, should we remember about Bing Beiderbixxe, the graphic artist Kenny idolizes? When Bock veers into Lethem and Chabon territory, he slips.

His writing is most beautiful when it's angry: In telling, true passages, Cheri finally sees through Ponyboy, Lestat figures out what he really needs and Newell gains insight -- at the very end. Or does he?

The novel ends open and desperate, though Bock tries to tie a bow on it in a "resources" appendix that invites people with related information to send him their data to publish in "a subsequent edition of the novel." Interesting interactive idea, indeed.

At the same time, it keeps "Beautiful Children" from speaking as clearly as it should. That "resources" device screams book clubs and discussion groups, lending an air of contrivance to a novel that targets the marvelous.