Vernon God Little

Finished DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little yesterday. If you want to know what it felt like to read it, imagine being a guidance counselor, and you’re forced to listen to a teenager ranting on and on about how lousy his life is. Whether or not you’ll ultimately get to the bottom of his problems depends on if you can treat a bellicose teenager with patience and equanimity.

Set in a small town of Texas, this book tells the story of an innocent teenager named Vernon Gregory Little. He is framed for a massacre in his school, including the murder of his best friend. Everybody in his neighborhood, including his mom, doubts his innocence, and it doesn’t help that there’s an attention-hungry guy wandering nearby, bent on wringing the most publicity in the light of the tragedy.

The synopsis is the first thing that sold me to the book; I’ve heard that it is inspired by the Columbine High School massacre, a topic that I was interested with when I bought it (and I don’t think my penchant for criminal psychology stuff has gone away much; I want to understand why people commit atrocious deeds, because I want to know what can be done to prevent them from happening). The second thing that has drawn me to buying it is the Man Booker Prize distinction printed so conspicuously on the cover. I know that awards shouldn’t tint my opinion of a book, but I can’t deny that they often lead me to assume that their winners can’t be bad.

When you’ve read both Vernon God Little and JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, you’ll invariably compare the two. So let me clear this up to let you know where I’m coming from: I love Catcher in the Rye. I rank it high in my list of all-time favorites; Vernon God Little, not so much. Both of them are narrated by angry teenagers, yet somehow Holden Caulfield ended up a lot more likable than Vernon Gregory Little. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but it may be because Holden’s problems felt closer to home than Vernon’s. Vernon is pissed because he’s surrounded by people who are sunk so deeply in crass commercial fast-food cultures they read more like caricatures of people so stupidly disengaged from the world (you’ll be a Boddhisatva if you can stand them). On the other hand, Holden hates because of, well, nothing much besides his cynicism. Which of the two is more interesting? I think Holden.

The greater problem with Vernon God Little is the language. I can stand some f-bombing, but this one does it in overkill it sucks the oxygen out of the reader. Later part gets rid of the cussing, which make it more pleasing to read, which then compels me to ask this: why all the profanity when they add nothing to the story?

The story is the one good thing I can point out, though. The first hundred pages are boring because I’m reading about Vernon’s ignorant neighbors that I could not care an iota about, but things pick up when the truth of the massacre gradually comes to light. I can even admit that on those parts I could not put the book down. True, the novel is clunky because of all the f-bombing, but at least you can be rest assured that underneath is a plot with great twists. It can be made a movie that is similar in tone to 8-Mile (the Eminem movie), and it will work very well. Or 90% of it will, at least. The remaining 10% is the unsatisfying beginning and ending. Yes, ending. I found it too easy. I would’ve preferred for it to end another way because it could’ve been offered chilling social commentaries. As it is, though, the story wraps up like most Hollywood films, killing its potential to resonate.

So, slow beginning, lame ending, and a very gripping in-between. If you can be cool with that, then you might like Vernon God Little more than I did.