Anyone who calls himself D.B.C. (Dirty But Clean) Pierre can't be all bad!

Texas Monthly featured this author in the October meet the author event the magazine hosts in Austin. If Joyce Carol Oates thinks this is a good book, I imagine that it is a good book. The Booker Prize (whatever the Hell that is) jury thought it was a good book, too. If this be (fair & balanced) mimicry, make the most of it.

[x The New Yorker]
SHOWTIME
by JOYCE CAROL OATES
A Booker Prize winner reimagines America.

"It’s hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news.” So begins “Vernon God Little” (Canongate; $23), a frenetic yet unexpectedly moving first novel by the pseudonymous D. B. C. Pierre, this year’s dark-horse Booker Prize winner. 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.

D. B. C. (the initials stand for “Dirty But Clean”) Pierre was born Peter Finlay, in 1961, in Australia, but was brought as an infant to live in the United States and then Mexico; he spent his teen-age years in Mexico City, and as an adult he has lived in London, Australia, and Ireland. One of Pierre’s ongoing preoccupations is drawing cartoons, an ideal background for the creator of the foulmouthed but subtle-minded Vernon, whose vision of the adult world that surrounds him is savagely satiric: “This is how I’m being grown up, this is my fucken struggle for learnings and glory. A gumbo of lies, cellulite, and fucken ‘Wuv.’”

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: “Deputy Gurie tears a strip of meat from a bone; it flaps through her lips like a shit taken backwards.” And, “A strip of buffalo leather scrapes into the room, tacked around the soul of Sheriff Porkornay.”

Though Vernon loves his overweight, comically self-pitying mother, he smolders at her emotional blackmail of him, which he shrewdly assesses as a mother’s way of infantilizing a maturing, potentially rebellious son: “It’s like she planted a knife in my back when I was born, and now every fucken noise she makes just gives it a turn.” Vernon’s fury at his mother inspires some of the novel’s funniest rants:

I’ll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting shit into a humongous web, just like spiders. It’s true. They take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn’t matter what words you say, you feel it on your blade. Like, “Wow, see that car?” “Well it’s the same blue as that jacket you threw up on at the Christmas show, remember?” What I learned is that parents succeed by managing the database of your dumbness and your slime, ready for combat. They’ll cut you down in a split fucken second, make no mistake; much quicker than you’d use the artillery you dream about.

Vernon is a Holden Caulfield on amphetamines, with “lawless brown hair, the eyelashes of a camel. big ole puppy-dog features like God made me through a fucken magnifying glass. You know right away my movie’s the one where I puke on my legs.”

The action of “Vernon God Little” takes place after the high-school massacre. Pierre wisely makes little attempt to evoke the actual shootings and the suicide of the perpetrator. We see the broody “Meskin” (i.e., Mexican) Jesus Navarro only fleetingly, through Vernon’s sympathetic eyes: “He’s still clumsy as hell though, and his mind’s clumsy too; the certainty of our kid logic got washed away, leaving pebbles of anger and doubt that crack together with each new wave of emotion. . . . He keeps secrets from me, like he never did before. He got weird.” Among the secrets that Jesus, a boy beset by “philosophical headfucks,” keeps from Vernon is one regarding his sexual exploitation by two adult men (“Nuckles,” “Goosens”) involved in a homosexual pornography Web site, which precipitates the disaster.

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.” Even as the narrator presents an America of near-illiterate media-hypnotized idiots, who eagerly believe virtually anything they are told to believe, the appalled reaction to such a vision seems to come from a deeper place in the author’s psyche:

A learning grows in me like a tumor. It’s about the way different needy people find the quickest route to get some attention in their miserable fucken lives. The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition, Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker.

The novel’s funniest scenes, which are poor Vernon’s most desperate, take place in Mexico, where he has fled in order not to be arrested as an accessory to the mass murder. On his sixteenth birthday, he is seduced and betrayed by a college-student temptress who gives him up to the police, and is brought back to Texas to stand trial in a blaze of media attention: “They harness me into a chair, and we get escorted into town by half the world’s police cars. All the world’s helicopters ride overhead, beaming lights down like a Hollywood premiere, the fucken Slime Oscars, boy.” And awaiting the suspected psycho-killer are “hordes of angry people, the type that show up wherever angry people are needed.”

Disturbingly, in the novel’s final sections Vernon Gregory Little has morphed into the TV image of a generic psycho-kid killer, with a shaved head, thick eyeglasses, and a crucifix on a chain worn around his neck. Yet more disturbingly, Vernon no longer “cusses.” He’s trapped in a Texas prison that—all too plausibly, given the fad for reality TV—has sold broadcast rights for a program in which the prisoners are televised twenty-four hours a day for purposes of entertainment. The show’s producer points out, “Criminals cost money. Popular TV makes money. Criminals are popular on TV. Put them together and, presto—problem solved.”

Vernon, who soon finds himself in competition with other prisoners, is urged by his mother to perform for the TV cameras:

“It’s just that this week you’re up against that sweet cripple who supposedly killed his parents. And he cries all the time. All the time.’’
“You sayin I look guilty?”
“Well on camera you always just lie starring at the ceiling, Vernon, you can be so impassive.”
“But I didn’t do nothin.”
‘‘Don’t let’s start that again. I just don’t want the day to arrive and you not be—you know—ready.”

For all its energy and invention, “Vernon God Little” does occasionally flag. Mordant satire is uneasily matched with slapstick plot reversals, and it must be conceded that the objects of Pierre’s contempt—tabloid TV, consumer-culture idiocy, the American obsession with the sufferings of others, material goods, and “image”—are not very original. Jonathan Swift once observed, ‘‘Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own,” and so it might be charged, too, of satirists who excoriate others while exempting themselves from blame. “Vernon God Little” is fuelled by rage at those who would “turn slime into business,” but this may seem to be what Pierre himself has done with such skill and panache. As Vernon says, “I already know I’ll be offering a Service. I just have to Position and Package the thing.”

Copyright © 2003 The New Yorker Magazine