Vernon God Little
DBC Pierre (Faber & Faber)
Had I known how entertaining this novel was, I’d have read it years ago.
It’s a hilarious satirical snapshot of small-town life in Texas, as seen by a sensitive 15-year old boy who has survived a high-school massacre. His best friend Jesus Navarro has blown away 16 classmates and severely injured their teacher before shooting himself.
The book opens with Vernon Gregory Little being detained in the sheriff’s office as an accessory to mass murder and it takes a while to tune into his narrative voice :
Me , I wear the reddest T-shirt you ever saw, like a goddam six-year-old or something. I didn’t want to wear it. She controls what you wear by keeping everything else damp in the laundry.
Those lines are not enough to tell you whether you’ll enjoy the book but these might be :
Nobody yet figured out how to deal with Ella Bouchard. Her folks are like hillbilly types that don’t move their arms when they walk, and just stare straight ahead all the time. The kind that repeat everything eighty times when they talk, like, ‘That’s how it was, yessir, the way it was was just like that, just like that, the way it was.’ Probably explains why Ella’s kind of weird too.
As I say, it takes time to switch into Vernon’s alienated worldview but as soon as you do that the pages become compelling, and you wonder where the story will take him, and what the end will be.
His Mom and her friends are morons, the law officers are deeply dim, and his psychiatrist is a paedophile. The story romps forward, gathering pace towards an over-ambitious climax, where Death Row becomes a reality TV show. The ending strains for effect and that’s a shame because the point he’s making is a worthwhile one. His subject is not the USA, but the damage Amerikan TV does at home and abroad.
The trial makes that crystal clear when Vernon’s defence attorney stares at each member of the jury in turn and says, “What we will discover, ladies and gentlemen, is that no allegation of murder existed against my client until the day his picture appeared on our TV screens. From that moment on, virtually every murder in Central Texas and beyond has been attributed to him.”
True-life crime HAS been crudely commercialised already, and not just in the USA. It makes big $$$$$$. It was going that way when I first went to New York and saw the TV news cameras zoom into bloodstains on the street when they reported a murder or an accident. Our cameras never did that on the BBC, so I found it quite ugly. That sent me a clear signal : I was visiting a country with a colossal appetite for violence.
Vernon God Little is an audacious first novel, clunky in places, but still the wildest and funniest I’ve come across since Bright Lights, Big City in 1984. Clearly, DBC Pierre isn’t such an accomplished prose stylist as Jay McInerney because he had never written anything before, apparently. Also, he’s not American. He’s an Australian who lives in Ireland and his real name in Peter Finlay.
Any good comic novel with an adolescent narrator will be compared to Catcher in the Rye, and I think there are some conscious echoes of that classic. However, the time-lag is 50 years. Catcher in the Rye was a debut novel published in 1953 and Vernon God Little is a debut novel published in 2003. Holden Caulfield was a post-war schoolboy who lived before Elvis Presley exploded out of Memphis and revolutionised popular culture, while Vernon is a post-punk schoolboy living in the Eminem era. In others words, this is a new century. Amerika has changed in those 50 years and not for the better. It’s got a lot dumber and nastier, mainly because the government is now owned by big corporations and billionaires.