Narrated in the highly idiomatic voice of Vernon Gregory Little, a fifteen-year-old Texas boy whose rotten luck it is to find himself a ‘skate-goat’ in the aftermath of a Columbine-type massacre of sixteen high-school students committed by his best friend, Vernon God Little is raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental in about equal measure … Pierre has a flawless ear for adolescent-boy speech. To his young narrator, virtually every adjective is ‘fucken’ and every vision of every adult is laced with repugnance, especially those adults in authority … The novel is a curious admixture of high-decibel video-game farce and interludes of sobriety during which the author’s mask slips and we find ourselves in the presence not of the hormone-tormented Vernon but of a rueful adult male contemplating ‘this dry residue of horror.’
Vernon God Little might be the most vicious satire of American life to come out of England since Martin Amis' 1985 Money. Set in a small Texas town where residents' dependence on fried food and television has transformed them into oversize lemmings, the book puts an astute if needling finger on the scary collusion between entertainment and law enforcement in American culture … Martirio is a town painted with cartoonish stereotypes and scatological broad strokes....In the process of ranting about his town and family, Vernon beautifully mangles language into his own crude idiom. He complains about becoming a ‘scate-goat’ for a crime he did not commit, and worries that the ‘paradime’ shift that a sketchy TV producer promises him will actually put him behind bars. Mexicans are ‘Meskins,’ Timberland boots become ‘Tumbledowns.’ Even funnier, however, are the metaphors Vernon uses, most of which are too colorful to cite.
Vernon God Little rockets along for five acts of tragicomedy, as Vernon finds himself at the center of his town's lust for retribution, the center of attention for the first time in his short life. He was not in class when the shooting started. He is as innocent as the day is long, but has a few things he wouldn't like to say in public about his whereabouts. This will become his crime, or at any rate the proof of his inchoate guilt … The writing is simply terrific. In much the same way that noir novelists like James Ellroy seem steeped in the rhythms and textures of jazz, there is a jagged, punk-rock sensibility to Pierre's prose, absolutely his own. Plot aside – and there is much in this novel to keep the reader turning pages – Vernon God Little is just plain fun to read.
One of Pierre’s targets...is false storytelling, and how communities hysterically provide it. Alas this is by now a familiar subject, anointed by cultural studies, and it is not clear that the novel has any real insights into the matter, except to say that ‘television made me do it’ … For all the verbal skidding, D.B.C. Pierre is a conventionally good driver, and wants merely a chance to show off how well he can steer a straight course. He almost always strains belief in his narrator when he is most properly ‘literary’ as a writer; when he is being, unlike his narrator, a nice boy...For every false note, though, there is a sentence perfectly plucked and placed, when the obviously literary is checked by a weirdness, a tilted originality, that leads it back not to the author but plausibly enough to Vernon.
Vernon God Little shows some promise, but it is not a good book. More important even than that, it’s not a plausible book … DBC Pierre isn’t really capable of re-creating this voice. To make matters worse, he attempts a kind of Texan variation on the cranky teenage diction of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, possibly the single most distinctive and imitated voice in American fiction…Vernon God Little doesn’t sound American, it doesn’t sound Texan, and it doesn’t sound teenage … Vernon God Little isn’t really about school shootings in any meaningful way. The massacre is affixed to the book like a sticker vouching for its import, the thing that purportedly transforms it from a minor Salingeresque coming-of-age story into a ‘coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America.’
For one thing, it's hard to parody events that already verge on the absurd. For another, Mr. Pierre fails to use the sort of telling details or surreal developments that might lend his story an eerie verisimilitude, or jolt the reader into a recognition of a larger truth. Instead his tale ricochets mechanically between the predictable and the preposterous … For one thing, it's hard to parody events that already verge on the absurd. For another, Mr. Pierre fails to use the sort of telling details or surreal developments that might lend his story an eerie verisimilitude, or jolt the reader into a recognition of a larger truth. Instead his tale ricochets mechanically between the predictable and the preposterous.
Broad as this comedy is, Pierre takes his toughest shots at American media. Even before the police descend, ‘Lally’ Ledesma, a CNN reporter, is already lurking in the yard, greasing his way into Vernon's confidence, seducing his mother, and flattering her chubby friends. He's a fount of journalistic clichés and faux sympathy … Vernon God Little ultimately descends to the same simplistic level it rails against in American culture. Psychologists, religious leaders, law enforcement officers, educators, and parents have sweat blood trying to fathom the dark forces that motivate these rare but terrifying acts of school violence. But here, we learn that it's all perfectly simple: The murderer was publicly humiliated as the victim of a gay porn ring. Ah hah! This is the sort of psychological depth we might expect from one of Vern's favorite made-for-TV-movies.
Vernon has a gift for wordplay that would keep the shade of James Joyce amused, and the strongest motives for his fast, desperate talk, because he's wrongly accused in a schoolyard slaughter in Martirio, Texas, which has left all other witnesses and the real shooter dead … Vernon's wicked eye and still more wicked tongue crank the banalities of small-town Southern life into a corkscrew of the grotesque. Socially impaired by, among other things, an incontinence problem, Vernon is the sort of teenager who experiences adolescence as a horror movie even before the real horrors begin … Remarkably, the novel can successfully blend this sort of hyperbolic lampoon with as many moments of deep authenticity. The marvelously agile and flexible language Pierre puts in Vernon's mouth makes it happen. The juvenile nastiness of Vernon's speech is one of the truest things about it, but his voice is also capable of poetry, extended metaphor, even metaphysical conceit.
Perry takes a freewheeling, irreverent look at teenage Sturm und Drang in his erratic, sometimes darkly comic debut novel about a Texas boy running from the law in the wake of a gory school shooting … Unfortunately, Vernon's voice grows tiresome, his excesses make him rather unlikable and the over-the-top, gross-out humor is hit-or-miss. Perry's wild energy offers entertaining satire as well as cringe-provoking scenes, and though he can write with incisive wit, this is a bumpy ride.
Two things you should know at the outset. First, the narrative voice of 15-year-old Vernon Little overwhelms everything else. Second, the story is shaped like a doughnut. We know that one summer Tuesday in the oil town of Martirio in central Texas there occurred a Columbine-style massacre, and we know the identity of the shooter, but the context of the killings is withheld until near the end: that’s the hole in the doughnut … Humor and mass murder make for strange bedfellows, and first-timer Pierre fails to find the tone that might harmonize them.
