DBC Pierre: Vernon God Little
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, February 2004]
Let’s say you left last year’s Gus Van Sant movie Elephant – the eerie, elliptical, strangely moving take on a Columbine-like massacre at the hands of the picked-on and fed-up and armed – and thought, Geez, I’d love to see that sad topic taken on with less sensitivity and more…humor? Here’s your chance. DBC Pierre’s debut novel Vernon God Little (Cannongate), the surprise winner of last year’s Man Booker Prize, is a satiric, comic, even raunchy take on a such an event, this time at the hands of a picked-on, fed-up, armed boy named Jesus Navarro, whose few friends included Vernon Gregory Little, our narrator, and something of a pottie-mouthed Huck Finn with a panty fetish.
Here’s 15-year-old Vernon, shortly after being interrogated as a potential accessory to the murder: “I’m studying this whole tragedy routine, in back of my jellified brain….Saw-teeth of damnation I feel just thinking it, waiting for fiery hounds to unleash mastications and puke my fucken soul to hell. But at the same time, here’s me with water in my eyes, for Max, for all my classmates. The truth is a corrosive thing. It’s like everybody who used to cuss the dead is now lining up to say what perfect angels of God they were. What I’m learning is the world laughs through its ass every day, then just lies double-time when shit goes down. It’s like we’re on a Pritikin diet of fucken lies. I mean – what kind of fucken life is this?”
Life in Matirio, Texas, is ridiculous, unpleasant, dumbed-down, and slapstick funny, though sometimes in an unsurprising, stock-character way. The women swap diet plans and longingly watch shows about 10-year-old millionaires, while the men pull schemes and reveal their shadiness with steady frequency. Even more frequent are both sexes’ sauce-soaked trips to the Bar-B-Chew Barn, the closest thing Matirio has to a town square (and proud sponsor of the post-massacre find-the-gun contest).
The phrase “sluggish frenzy” is used by Vernon to describe the feeling inside one of the town’s market-carnival tents, and it’s a phrase that works for the whole book. After the widely covered tragedy, Matirio begins to buzz, with inept attorneys and news crews and police chiefs all fumbling about as if, pre-shooting, they’d never done much of anything.
The town’s coming down hard on Vernon, and with Jesus dead the boy can’t seem to find a way to prove his innocence. (He could, but he’d have to admit he was outside the school at the time of the shooting, taking an outdoor crap. This is that kind of book.) Surrounded by a helpless mom whose only pre-trial advice is that “famous actors put toothpaste under their eyes to help them cry,” and indifferent, slimy newsman blowing bubbles like, “[How] do we heal America?” Vernon makes a decision: “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.”
Which he does. And because the novel is a fugitive-type tale, I’ll keep the plot details few and just say that before the book’s last section (complete with a Big Brother-style trial and prison scene, the reference no longer Orwellian, just Prime Timeian), Vernon’s able to spend some quality time with his major crush Taylor Figueroa, of whom he daydreams wearing “blue synthetic panties that strain hard into her thigh-vee, and glow dirty ripe.”
Pierre’s language in this novel, however limited and puerile-sounding, works. With a dirty-joke vividness, his narrator gives greasy life to everything that surrounds him: “Deputy Gurie tears a strip of meat from a bone; it flaps through her lips like a shit taken backwards”; his mom’s equally helpless friends “foam out of the car like suds from a sitcom washing machine…”; the Burt Bacharach record his mom adores is “all tappetty-shucksy, bubbly silk pie….[a] typical stroke-job of music lies.”
This first-time author’s achievement with Vernon God Little is not one of plot or even ideas, but one of language and description, in capturing Vernon’s own authentic voice throughout the book (he tries to quit cussing, just like Huck). This isn’t, and isn’t meant to be, a penetrating look at adolescent rage. Instead, it’s a creative work that succeeds in its ability to remain exactly what it is – funny, ridiculous, lude, so entirely dissimilar from what the subject seems to demand. And whenever the author inches dangerously closer to grappling with a Big Idea – with the reader wondering if the book’s just been a sauce-smothered morality lesson – good old Vernon, perfectly himself, reigns us back into the book’s sweaty, simple reality. “The Human Condition,” he tells us. “Watch out for that fucker.”
