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Reviewed by:
  • Vernon God Little
  • Sarah Fay McCarthy
Vernon God Little by D. B. C. PierreCanongate Books, 288 pp., $23

When it was announced at the end of last year that Vernon God Little had won the Man Booker, England's most coveted award for literature, the author, D. B. C. Pierre, didn't stand up to accept his award. [End Page 183] Instead he sat there as if he could not believe his ears. An outsider in the literary community, Pierre was not favored to win. He'd spent his first forty years dodging bullets, gambling and doing drugs. Renowned for having lived most of his life as a gambler, addict and con man, D. B. C. Pierre (his real name is Peter Finlay) beat out such favorites as Monica Ali and Margaret Atwood for the prize. While everyone around him stood to applaud, Pierre was still in his seat, dumbstruck.

In some ways, it's easy to see why. Vernon God Little is not a typical prize-winning novel. It is the story of fifteen-year-old Vernon Little, who is held responsible for a Columbine-style massacre at his school in Martirio, Texas. The story centers on the inhabitants of Martirio, all of whom are unscrupulous and self- absorbed. Vernon's mother and her friends hover around the television set and rotate in and out of the Bar-B-Chew Barn while discussing their diets. Even when the media descends on the town after the incident and Vernon is implicated in the killings, their obsessions do not change. Vernon's mother is more concerned with getting a side-by-side refrigerator than with proving her son's innocence.

Vernon is not guilty but flawed. He has adolescent notions of grandeur and ends up making several wrong decisions. Once it's clear that the town isn't going to rally behind him, he says, "If this is how much of an asshole everybody's going to be, about such a devastating fucken issue, then I better get the hell out of town. Maybe even out of Texas." He'd rather keep his pride and get the girl than clear his name. He often considers what Jean-Claude Van Damme would do. After making a fool of himself while getting out of a cab, he says, "Van Damme would rip the back of his hand off rather than squirm like this, he'd punch the driver's lights out." Vernon is an action hero in a blockbuster movie, an extreme version of the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

Vernon's voice is so dead-on that it is easy to inhabit the mind of this American teenager for three hundred pages and feel you really understand him. His insights and observations may be self-indulgent and speckled with profanity, but Vernon is endearing in a Holden Caufield way: he says the things we won't say and sees the things we don't want to see.

To Vernon these are "learnings," life lessons that people choose to ignore, which are sprinkled like proverbs throughout the novel. "There's the learning, O Partner: that you're cursed when you realize true things, because then you can't act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore." Or, "Needy people find the quickest route to get some attention in their miserable fucken lives." Pierre bestows these profound insights on Vernon so we won't discount him.

But despite his spotty wisdom, ultimately Vernon does not believe anything will ever happen to him. By the second half of the novel, events spiral out of control. As Vernon loses his grip on life, so does Pierre lose his grip on his novel.

The plot begins to careen senselessly, and though it is still captivating to be in Vernon's head, some [End Page 184] scenes are so unbelievable that we feel as though Pierre wrote this book to be a movie. The ending of the novel borders on the ridiculous. Everything is tied up neatly in a way that seems beneath both Vernon and Pierre.

Vernon God Little is a wild ride, something you don't completely...

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