Just finished Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre – a disturbing book that won the Man Booker Price in 2003. See an Extract. The main character is a teenager that everyone suspects was an accomplice in a school murder spree. The language makes the book – it starts as trailer-trash talk, but you begin to realize that Vernon is brighter than the awful people of his Texas town almost all of whom are disgusting, overweight, twisted, or manipulative. The end gets surreal as Vernon manipulates others once a fellow death-row inmate teaches him about God and working with people’s wants. It is not clear if the final part is a hallucination brought on by the drugs that kill him, or real events after an unlikely pardon.
The book is spectacular in ways, hard to keep reading at times, and unbelievable at others. It satirizes small greedy overweight America and its love of murder and television. At times I felt DBC Pierre (who is supposed have been a cad/con himself) doesn’t really know the world he manipulates. It’s as if it were a very well deployed stereotype that would appeal to Brits hungry for nasty reality about the US.
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