Observer review: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Most things about DBC Pierre’s violently satirical debut novel, Vernon God Little, are remarkable and some are just inimitable, writes Jonathan Heawood

Vernon God Little
by DBC Pierre
Faber £12.99, pp277

Most things about this violently satirical debut novel are remarkable and some are just inimitable. DBC Pierre's protagonist, 15-year-old misfit Vernon Gregory Little, narrates his story in phrases that whip off the page like gunshot - 'See what happens now I'm in trouble. See the awesome power of trouble. Trouble fucken rocks.' The book shouts out for cinematic treatment, but Bowling for Columbine aside, are US audiences ready for a film in which the hysterical response to a high-school massacre is satirised as harshly as Chris Morris has treated British attitudes towards paedophilia?

Vernon Little's best friend, Jesus Navarro, has just shot 16 of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. Although the case is open and shut, the town needs a living scapegoat and they turn to Vernon - lumbering, withdrawn and too embarrassed to defend himself because, at the time of the massacre, he was, quite literally, shitting himself.

There may seem something distasteful about hovering so close to real pain, and something snidely liberal about satirising its dumb-ass, white-trash victims, but how many writers of prose this wired would even begin to speak for such people? Unfortunately, most of Pierre's characters are, at best, two-dimensional and it's not always clear whose side he's on, who is being satirised and for which sins.

Vernon's mother's best friend, Palmyra, is the only woman in their circle so fat that she makes Mrs Little feel good about herself: 'Mom's other friends are slimmer. They're not her best friends.' Acerbic notes like this are funny but isolating; because Vern's voice is so strong, so unanswerable, there is no room for a second opinion, for Eulalio Ledesma, or Vaine Gurie, or Oliver Goosens, or any of the other improbably named and ultimately rather pathetic characters to tell their side of the story. Least of all do we hear from Vern's dead best friend, Jesus.

Even Vernon Gregory Little is a function of his endlessly inventive voice that zings with energy but sometimes misses its target. Yet in Vern's words, we hear something of life in Martirio - the barbecue-sauce capital of Texas - and see him and Jesus growing up with anger for ammunition: 'We razed the wilds outside town with his dad's gun, terrorised ole beer cans, watermelons, and trash. It's like we were men before we were boys, back before we were whatever the fuck we are now.'

Vern's world is a wild one but it's all he's got. To this extent, Pierre is the victim of his own narrator, for VGL's fantasies are limited to the impoverished dreams of his washed-up town. On the run from a set-up, he gets as far as a prom queen in Houston and a beach house in Acapulco. From small-town Texas, Mexico is as far into the Other as he can imagine: 'Night doesn't die in Mexico. If the world was flat, you just know the edge would look like this.' About to jump off the known world, Vern is caught on the hooks of his lust for the divine but two-faced Taylor Figueroa, and hauled back to face trial for the murders not only of his classmates, but of anyone else unlucky enough to be killed in Texas during the days he was on the run.

This is the America of the National Enquirer and court TV, not the country lived in by millions for whom nothing, in fact, ever happens. In attempting to represent the luckless inhabitants of this secret nation, Pierre sometimes credits them with the sins of their manipulative media, confusing the victims of reality television with its producers. This stands in marked contrast to Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole, published earlier this month, in which Proulx sympathetically locates Texas and its people within history. Pierre's Texans have destroyed history. And in the double-ending which sees Vernon slide ambiguously between life and death, Pierre puts the final bullet into the corpse of his story's own credibility. On the other hand, Pierre could write Proulx into the ground: fierce, crazed and passionate, his first novel may not be the most balanced book to emerge out of America this year, but it must be one of the most driven.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpZ2xnmpa7cH2YaJ2im6SevK96xZ6Yra2imsBz