Vernon God Little

DBC Pierre Vernon God Little (2003)
I've never been particularly swayed by things winning awards, much less by keeping up with the latest, but I bought Vernon God Little back when it had just bagged various prizes and was still officially the best thing ever because I saw the author reading excerpts on telly and it sounded great. So I read it, and it was indeed great; following which DBC Pierre seemingly disappeared, vaguely resurfacing only to deliver a disappointing second novel before finding himself consigned to restaurant review limbo in the broadsheets, or something of the sort; and everyone forgot about Vernon, and it probably wasn't that good anyway.

Fifteen years later, I'm surprised to find it's actually better than I remember and more than justifies the level of acclaim it received. It's a fairly simple story, told by the friend of a school shooter who finds himself sucked in by that media circus we keep hearing about, and it's set in small town Texas - which is one hell of a lot more familiar to me this time around, so Pierre's version of the setting is thankfully both faithful and sympathetic.

This is a neighbourhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Deutschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors.

Vernon God Little is additionally a satire, specifically in so much as that it takes the piss out of certain aspects of American culture, justifying the subheading, a 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death. However, it should be noted that we're talking comedy in the sense of Dante, not Only Fools and fucking Horses. Pierre exaggerates for effect, possibly also acknowledging that truth is usually stranger than fiction - and particularly so here in Texas. Our endlessly sardonic teenage narrator has a whiff of the Beavis & Butthead about him, but without the stupidity which would have facilitated a much easier life.

I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge. Look at the way things are. I'm no fucken genius or anything, but these spazzos are in charge of my every twitch. What I'm starting to think is maybe only the dumb are safe in this world, the ones who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing. But see me? I have to think about every little fucken thing.

Vernon is insightful, delivering a gripping testimony with genuine wit, and the great tragedy of his existence seems mirrored by the fate of this book, at least if the accolades reproduced on the inside cover are any indication, most of which seem to miss the point by at least several light years. 'Funnier than The Simpsons, closer to the knuckle than The Office,' writes some complete bell-end from Publishing News, whatever that was; and then we have the hopeless cunt from the Irish Examiner who writes, this is Jerry Springer land, a laugh-a-minute orgy of dysfunction; a topsy-turvy US of A… You have been warned. Let's take another quick look at this laugh-a-minute orgy of dysfunction.

Look at her: flushed and shiny with sweat, hunched under her brown ole hair, in her brown ole kitchen. Deep inside, her organs pump double-time, trying to turn bile into strawberry milk. Outside, her brown ole life festers uselessly around the jokey red bow on her dress.

RAOTLFLMAO! Chortle! Chortle! Oh my aching sides! I suppose the problem here is that some people, specifically people without much worldly experience still regard Americans as slow-learning hamburger-chugging God-bothering porkers, so when you make a statement like all Americans eat at McDonald's, love Jesus and are very stupid, certain twats will mistake it for a general truism, and a few of those will even take it for comedy gold. I expect the Irish Examiner bloke must have pissed his pants every time Pierre had Vernon eat a candy bar with an unfamiliar name. Even the more sympathetic reviews refer to Pierre's take on life in Hicksville…

I can't help wondering if this bewilderingly off target reception was partially to blame for Pierre's failure to follow up. This is a genuinely wonderful novel, witty, sardonic without any of the sneering invoked by the reviews, and masterfully walking the tightrope between realism and absurdity; and whilst it won prizes, it seems to have been judged in part by people who read new books - rather than people who just read books - and who have somehow mistaken it for Tom Sharpe does Texas. Ironically, this also serves to illustrate everything DBC Pierre has said about humanity in Vernon God Little.