Product Description

Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble, and it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon, the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks, eager for a scapegoat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #150895 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 279 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
If there's any justice, it is only a matter of time before the work of the curiously-named DBC Pierre becomes essential reading for anyone interested in cutting-edge writing today. Vernon God Little is a book that has a totally individual (and very quirky) identity, from a writer with a finger on the pulse of contemporary society (particularly its less comfortable aspects). Pierre is also a satirical writer in the vein of such talents as Terry Southern, and there is a manic quality to his work that makes the experience of reading him both disorienting and exhilarating. As a first novel, this is a remarkable achievement.

Teenager Vernon Gregory Little's life has been changed by the Columbine-style slaughter of a group of students at his high school. Soon his hole-in-the-wall town is blanketed under a media siege, and Vernon finds himself blamed for the killing (rather than the real culprit, a friend of Vernon's). Eulalio Ledesma is his particular nemesis, manipulating things so that Vernon becomes the fulcrum for the bizarre and vengeful impulses of the townspeople of Martirio. After a truly surrealistic set of events, Vernon finds himself heading for a fateful assignation in Mexico with the delectable Taylor Figueros (everyone in the book has names as odd as the author's).

By setting his novel in the barbecue-sauce capital of Central Texas, Pierre ensures that his narrative is going to be some distance from naturalistic writing. And as a scalpel-like satirical incision into the mores of contemporary America, reality TV and media hysteria, Vernon God Little often reads like a fractured modern-day take on such novels as John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. --Barry Forshaw

Review
The terrorist atrocity that flattens skyscrapers or turns a busy nightclub into a crater is typically described by eyewitnesses as "like a film" and by novelists as an event too improbable for fiction. It is some years since Philip Roth wrote in a famous essay about a reality that is "a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination". It is this reality, the one you couldn't make up if you tried, which only makes sense as an insane film, that is the subject of this utterly original first novel about an American teenager falsely accused of a high school massacre, put on trial by television, and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Funnier than The Simpsons, closer to the knuckle than The Office, this is comic writing of the highest order. Pierre is a very clever and - quite possibly - extremely dangerous man.

Jonathan Lethem
'Read Vernon God Little not only for its dangerous relevance, but for the coruscating wit and raw vitality of its voice...'

Customer Reviews

U . S . EH???
I really couldn't wait to dive into this book. I admit I was a little giddy from all of those glowing comparisons I'd heard in the press: 'The Simpsons meet The Osbournes en route to Eminem," all of that tantalising praise seemed to make this book tailor-made for a contemporary Pop Culture Vulture like me.
I was expecting all the sharp Stateside wit of your average episode of Fraiser, but perhaps with swearing. Something fun but essentially throwaway. To be honest, I wasn't expecting a hard time.

The first difficulty I blundered across was the relentless voice of the main character, Vernon. This kid's language is hacked into harsh fragments of over-observed teen-speak; sometimes allegorical beyond the years of your average fifteen year old Mall-Rat. This was more like Henry Miller in 'Tropic of Cancer', but with an irksome Texan drawl.

I was then assaulted by the relentless introduction of the characters; a bloated band of widowed Harpies, a slimey selection of authority figures - all with disturbing ulterior motives, vacuous and unlikable fellow teens; all of these freaks were dealt out to me like a bad Poker hand. Oh, and did I mention that all of this was beset by the back-story of a shocking mass murder of sixteen schoolkids?
I wasn't enjoying myself at all. This was hard. This wasn't Homer Simpson saying: D'oh!

I read on, as the awful un-american events unfolded and became seedier and more hopeless. I began to sneer at the bleak nation that was so crudely mapped within the pages. I began to laugh at it.

I suppose that's where I sort of got it - acclimatized if you will. I was no longer on the side of slick, witty america and its throwaway one-liner, sanitized sit-com smugness. I was now snickering and smirking at the ludicrous land that poor Vernon Little was trapped in and was being savagely manipulated by.
I found the whole ghastly media circus, (ringmastered by the cartoonish 'Eulalio Ledesma' character) repulsive and quite hilarious. In the end I was enjoying myself, but I felt like I needed a good shower afterwards.

This is not the america I thought I knew, but I'm certain it's the america that most americans know - or would rather not know.
For that I would urge you to read this book. It's very horrible, it's very vulgar, it's very disturbing, it's very funny.

Vernon Genius Little
This book, without a doubt is in my top 3 books of all time. Most times the narrative is a jumbled mess of stream of consciousness that constantly flips between the average internal dialogue of a 15yr old boy to that of a 40 yr old social psychologist with 2 PhDs in modern societal pressures and methods of alienation - especially when it comes to Vernon's observations of the people around him. Amazingly, the story does not suffer one bit from it. Even with the inconsistency in 1st person narrative, never once does Pierre skip a beat or make the reader feel lost. Even Vernon's vulgar language is welcome throughout - grounding the reader in the reality of whom is speaking. And even if you ignore all the obvious societal/psychological commentary, it's just a damn good story that made me laugh out loud numerous times. It has literally been years since I've connected so much with a character and yearned for him to have the storybook ending and for all the villains to get their comeuppance. It's been so long since I've cheered for the protagonist instead of wishing they'd drown in a vat of their own syrupy induced self-importance, morality, and wisdom. Vernon, plain and simple, is a scared kid who did what most scared kids would do but unfortunately always seemed to do it at the wrong times and with the wrong people watching. Finally (how appropriate), the ending is one of, if not the best, I've ever read. So often authors take you on such a great journey only to leave you lost in the middle of nowhere in the final chapter. Not Pierre. The emotional tug of war he takes the readers through in the final chapters is brilliantly written and emotionally evoking without being tacky or overly sentimental. It also managed to tie up loose ends that you didn't even know existed, or forgot about, in the most marvellous fashion. I'm going to be hard pressed to find a book that moves me as much as VGL did (and still does for that matter). The next author I pick up is going to have a very tough act to follow.

Barbecuing for Columbine
DBC Pierre's Booker prize-winning novel of course cannot live up to the hype, though it is at times an exhilarating and funny read it can also be hackneyed and unappealing. Told in the wacky first-person narrative of American slacker kid Vernon Gregory Little, the novel's set in Martirio, Texas - the "barbecue sauce capital of the world" - and peopled by an hilarious cast of grotesques from the fast-food obsessed police detective Vaine Guerie with barbecue sauce dripping down her double chins to the TV-repair man come ace TV reporter Eulalio Ledesma looking to turn Death Row into "live" entertainment - well this is the Land of Opportunity, right? Our anti-hero is always in the wrong place at the wrong time and predictably, a Columbine-style massacre carried out by Vernon's best friend sees him take the rap. Though it's been compared to such classics as Catcher in the Rye, the author really doesn't make his scatterbrained protagonist loveable enough for the reader to actually care about and the big satirical themes skewering white-trash America, gun ownership and Big Brother type TV have been just about done to death before, if you'll excuse the Pierre-style pun. That's not to say Vernon God Little's a bad book since the author does have his own unique brand of shocking black humour and unlike his creation he seems to have been in the right place at the right time. So much so he's become some kind of pin-up boy for sections of the British literary establishment as rabid anti-Americanism is very, very relevant, so it's a fashionable piece of fiction without being a great one.