Book: Vernon God Little

Author: DBC Pierre
Publisher:

Vernon God Little, the 2003 winner of the Booker Prize, is the type of book that has you turning pages to see what happens next, gets your heart racing with adrenaline, and makes you shake your head with both wonder and horror at the ability of human beings to enact absurd cruelties upon each other with the ease of drinking a glass of water on a hot dusty day.

Although DBC Pierre’s debut novel is touted as a comedic tour-de-force, you will not laugh out loud so much as snort, snicker, or twist your lips at the bitingly sarcastic jokes scattered throughout this satiric romp through the Southwestern United States. What remains with you after you’ve done with the book is not its humor, but the innocence of its narrator, beneath all the irony and the bravado of his surreal life in Martirio, Texas, the self-proclaimed “barbeque capital” of America.

Vernon Little is a fifteen year old boy living a life of quiet desperation under the eye of his single, sad mother in the dry, small town of Martirio, where the most popular hangout is the local Bar-B-Chew, pump jacks dot the lawns of the tumbledown houses, and obesity is the physical, mental, and emotional norm of its inhabitants. But despite the stultifying atmosphere, Pierre drops us right in the middle of the action, where Vernon is the main suspect in a school slaying along the lines of what took place in real life in Columbine, Colorado.

Little is not a criminal; he is the pawn in a series of get-rich-quick schemes and trigger-happy justice that characterizes much of today’s Bible Belt America. Before Vernon can blink, he is bamboozled and bullied into the jaws of what seems to him (and us) as a totally illogical legal system, taken advantage of by a con artist masquerading as a CNN correspondent, and left to the mercy of a state-provided attorney who can barely pronounce English properly. All the while Vernon protests his innocence, and the true happenings of that day are told to us in flashbacks, where Vernon recalls the torment of his best friend Jesus Navarro, who suffered the double indemnity of being both a loser and a Mexican in a mind-numbingly racist town, committed the murders, and then turned the gun on himself.

Vernon himself is no hero; in fact his character seems to be modeled along the lines of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Average in every way, angry at all the adults in his life for being such disappointments, lurching his way towards manhood without any kind of role model (his father disappeared and has been presumed dead but no one has ever found a body), he stumbles into a real-life circus where he is the biggest attraction, and tries, then fails, to get out of it in the clumsiest ways possible. Yet his searing observations about his plight, the people around him, and the ways of the world he lives in are unforgettable. In language that would suit guests of the Jerry Springer Show, scatalogically obsessed and fuelled by fifteen year old hormones, he knows he has been caught in the trap of everyone else’s ambitions, yet he manages to remain somehow uncorrupted by their greed and desires.

Vernon’s only thought is to run away from the authorities and escape to Mexico, somehow taking along the girl of his dreams, Taylor Figueroa, with him to live in a beach house and sunbathe on the shores of an imaginary ocean. Pursued by Eulalio Ladesma, the shyster who tries to befriend him, seduces his mother, and then constructs a dot com empire out of Vernon’s trial, befriended by the not-quite-all-there Ella Bouchard, and haunted by his best friend Jesus’s ghost, Vernon gets through all the pitfalls of an absurdly haphazard journey, and yet stumbles at the last minute. He must face his persecutors and take a different kind of journey to the brink of death, in order to truly become a man, and it’s one of the great strengths of the book that you don’t even realize that was his destination until he finally arrives there.

The pace that the book maintains from the first page to the last is one of high tempo, and Pierre manages to evoke with great skill the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of living in this region of the country. White rap and deep fried fast food are the music and the tastes of Martirio, and you will almost feel the fat accumulating in your arteries as you get to know it better. Vernon and the people around him with are colorful in more ways than one; they don’t evoke sympathy in any obvious way, and yet the pathetic manner in which they try to bring dignity to their lives does a lot to make you understand where they’re coming from.

Pierre’s ability to get inside the heads of his characters and unravel all their motivations, their greed, their selfishness and their care for one another beneath it all is striking; his ease with language, as if effortlessly swimming in a deep and brilliant sea, will impress you. But what lingers in your mind is the character of Vernon, who undergoes more humiliation in three weeks than most of us would like to encounter in a lifetime. How he manages to make something positive out of a trap-like situation and learn more than a few lessons along the way is inspirational, as much as his background and life up to this point are not. Besides all that, Vernon God Little is just plain fun, something that not many books, in these days of meaningful commentary and literary heavy-handedness, manage to pull off at all.