Vernon God Little
by DBC Pierre
Summary
Vernon Gregory Little is fifteen and lives in Martirio, Texas, the barbecue sauce capital of central Texas, where his best friend Jesus has just shot sixteen classmates and himself. Vernon was not there. Vernon has no alibi that he is willing to explain. Within days a failed television repairman with a camcorder has decided Vernon is the accomplice, and the town, which badly wants a story, agrees.
The novel is narrated by Vernon in a stream of profane, hurtling teenage Texan that is the whole reason it exists. He runs to Mexico, is brought back, and ends up on death row as a reality television spectacle in which viewers vote on executions.
It is a satire on American media, litigation, diet culture, therapy language and the appetite for a scapegoat, written at maximum volume and sustained there. The comedy is broad, cruel and constant.
Be warned that the voice is the entire experience, and that people divide sharply on it. Readers who find it exhilarating finish it in two days. Readers who find it exhausting rarely make it past a hundred pages. It is also very much a book of 2003, and its targets have aged unevenly. Try twenty pages before committing.
It suits readers who loved The Catcher in the Rye and want something angrier, or anyone who enjoys satire that refuses to be tasteful. It does not suit readers who want a sympathetic account of a school shooting, which this pointedly is not. It is short, loud and best read fast, before the register wears you down.
Historical Context & Significance
Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize in 2003, a debut novel by a writer using a pseudonym, and it was a genuine shock result.
It became the first novel to take both the Whitbread first novel award and the Booker in the same year, and it added the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. One of the judges later said publicly that the other four had arrived at the longlist meeting convinced it was a masterpiece of the new century while he considered it a promising first novel, which gives a fair sense of the split.
The author's own history became part of the story. DBC Pierre had a documented past of debt and deception, which he discussed openly, and he announced that the prize money would go toward repaying people he had defrauded.