Meanwhile in Dopamine City

DBC Pierre Meanwhile in Dopamine City (2020)
Up until this year I had assumed that DBC Pierre had jacked it in following the thorough slagging which I seem to recall Ludmilla's Broken English had garnered. I looked online but could find nothing more recent. Then taking another look just a few months ago I discovered at least three novels I'd somehow missed, so not only is he back, but it turns out that he hasn't actually been away.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is nothing less than a dissection of why everything is shit. Some will tell you that the idea of everything being shit is an erroneous assessment, even suggesting that we've perhaps forgotten about rickets, cot death, and Adolf Hitler. The reason it's an erroneous assessment is usually because you're old and not everyone who likes manga is necessarily a kiddy fiddler, which is racist to say, and all sorts of other poorly defined reasons which twenty-something victims of product placement wearing cat ears will generally hide behind slogans, flags, hashtags, retweets, and strength in numbers because it's all about how you feel, and you just a hater. Get over it. You're like really old LOL.

This is a story about a father who strives to separate his nine-year old daughter from her smartphone, and it could have gone the Richard Littlejohn route, except DBC Pierre is a master of nuance, with not a molecule out of place in his scathing testimony, no ambiguity, not even a gap by which to accommodate anything he didn't actually say - before anyone starts rolling their eyes over cancel culture or its alleged non-existence. This being the third of his novels that I've read, I can see the pattern and feel I understand the first two a little better. Pierre writes satire in the Swiftian sense, but his escalation of reality is so extreme as to border on the Bugs Bunny cartoons of the forties, with Will Self growing a vagina at the back of some rugby player's kneecap seeming almost sober by comparison. Yet, Pierre's prose is of such precision as to nail his narrative firmly to something we can only recognise as reality. If this one is almost science-fiction in its dabbling with cyberspace, social media, and quantum bollocks, it feels like the novel which William Gibson has been trying to write but never managed because he gets too hung up on designer labels and usually forgets to fucking say anything.

Lon sucked a blast of crisp air through his nose, rinsed it around as if to renew his brain as the world renewed around him. He didn't know if it was bad shit out and good stuff in - nobody knew if it was bad shit out and good stuff in any more. For Lon's money the Medinas hadn't been bad shit, Capital hadn't been a bad bank, waiting for the hair to arrive on your parts hadn't been a bad time to start talking teabagging, but now it was shit out, shit in, and nobody knew which was which any more, nobody seemed to care - it didn't matter if it was bad shit, there was no bad any more, there was no good, no scientific basis for either, it was all shit out, shit in.

The bad shit is, in case you haven't looked out of the window lately, pretty much the voracious ascendance of what Guy Debord described as the Spectacle and the devaluation of reality and human experience by ideology, even amorphous corporate driven almost ideology. Pierre communicates the divide with a shocking switch of narrative technique, the first hundred or so pages of poetic second person prose flipping to disorientating first person accounts sharing each page with a sidebar, essentially splitting the narrative into a plurality of cause and effect. This takes some getting used to. I read each first person account then flipped back to catch up on the sidebars, which sort of works. The sidebars comprise the kind of sub-newsy shite the internet chucks at you at almost every click which, in this case, informs what's going on in the novel and is in turn informed by it.

78177407943098723-0203437: Donkeyhooty de la Munchies announced he's going 'quad' and moving on to all fours for life. The move has been hailed by the wider Low-Responsibility Individuals community - better known as Loris - as a major step towards its recognition as a thriving lifestyle sector. Though not originally a Lori himself, Donkeyhooty aligned with the movement after being forced to defend his right as a quadruped to relieve himself in public, if only in parks and on verges. A recent survey reported that Loris have overtaken Emos as the lifestyle of choice for disaffected under-thirties, though they still rank well below haulers.

I've attempted to reproduce the author's de-emphasis by use of greyed-out text, which I assume attempts to invoke the attention span which is typically applied to such information. In contrast to the familiar human drama of the main text, the narrative unfolding through the sidebars jumps a shark every third or fourth page yet without diminishing the integrity of the whole, and anyone claiming otherwise - particularly anyone invoking hyperbole, overreaction or hysteria - might start by looking up either Richard Hernandez or Anthony Loffredo. Never in human history has there been a better time for the expression of self-loathing.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is not an easy book, and even though it works, and works well, the split narrative is too disorientating to facilitate anything you could describe as a comfortable ride, but it's undeniably and cathartically exhilarating as blast of random noise, like William Burroughs but with a much sharper focus; and I'm not sure I've read a more thorough, convincing, or funnier damnation of our times.

Ludmila's Broken English

DBC Pierre Ludmila's Broken English (2006)
Still aglow from Vernon God Little and having regarded it as the greatest novel I'd ever read, I rushed out and bought a copy of this, Pierre's second novel, the day it hit the shops, or specifically the day it hit Waterstone's on Oxford Street. In fact I was so quick off the blocks that I found I'd bought a copy signed by the author without even meaning too. I guess I might even have met the man himself had I made it to Waterstone's before five in the evening, but Marian had decided we should make a day of it, like couples do, so it's probably a miracle that we actually made it to the store before closing time. Marian bought something from the self-help section, a book with a title like How to Better Manage Your Money or How to Not Spend Money on Shit You Don't Actually Need, something along those lines. It cost twenty quid, the irony of which was, as ever, lost on her.

In the wider world, Ludmila's Broken English met with a lukewarm reception as I recall, that difficult second book by someone with a lot to live up to, although it probably didn't help that most of the critics had apparently mistaken Vernon God Little for Tom Sharpe does Deliverance.

Ludmila, like her predecessor, is darkly comic, but with significantly less chance of anyone mistaking the gallow's humour for an episode of Filthy, Rich & Catflap. Also problematic, I would guess, would have been the broken English of the title, conjoined twins, now separated, respectively named Blair and Gordon, and blatantly based on Tony and Mr. Brown. Weirder still is that they seem to be the offspring of Ted Heath, although I suppose politically speaking it's not such a massive leap for something so obviously satirical. The novel is about their progress and eventual meeting with Ludmila, Blair's bride to be from the former Soviet Union and now inhabitant of a homeland comprising mainly grinding poverty and explosions. So the frame to which these characters find themselves bolted is frankly fucking ridiculous, and I know I found this aspect a bit of a stumbling block first time around, as I guess did most of the reviewers; but fifteen years later, sat in a country run by a man who has just told us to inject bleach, the sledgehammer elements of the narrative seem less obstructive. In fact they remind me a bit of Gogol, which is odd.

This time around, the parallels - not least Tony Blair and Gordon Brown - seem more like starting points than direct statements in and of themselves, although Pierre has Blair's woolly speech patterns down to a tee; and their exchanges are wonderfully horrible, Harold Pinter writing Hancock's Half Hour as one of Francis Bacon's more biologically distraught canvases. Everything is cutting and witty and darkly poetic, and this is probably part of the problem: lacking the grounding in directly experienced reality which clearly informed Vernon God Little, the narrative becomes relentless, even exhausting - a great idea which didn't quite fit the frame. A lawn dart tossed blindfold at Ludmila's Broken English will find ruthless, devastating prose every single time, but the whole lacks plasma, a written medium by which the material is delivered. My guess would be that the pressure of Vernon blowing up as it did could be to blame, but who knows?

Ludmila's Broken English is, roughly speaking, about neoliberalism and more or less everything that's been wrong with the world at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's argument is clearly stated with all due venom and without sermonising. It's only real failure is that it should have been better.

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.