Love.

It exists in its own unique reality, a reality where everything seems to conspire against this kid. Whether it makes sense in our ordinary world or not, it doesn't matter.

At first, I thought it was overly stylized. However, as I delved deeper, the consistent writing style completely immersed me in this kid's head, language, and reality.

To me, it was a beautiful experience, although it might not be to everyone's taste.

Moreover, everything in the story was unexpected. Just when you think something good will finally happen, the opposite occurs. And when you anticipate something horrible, it takes a twist.

I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge.

I really didn't like this book at all. However, I have to admit that it captures the spirit of America in an unpleasantly accurate way. It is vulgar, frustrating, and sad in a farcical manner. It showcases the kind of (anti-)culture that has created the nationwide mess which is now evident to the whole world, and for which the whole world may have to pay.

Meet the unsympathetic, cursing, uneducated antihero and his family in a small town in Texas. You will either laugh or cry, depending on the kind of philosopher you tend to be.

How do you deal with the hopeless stupidity of mankind? No answers can be found in this story. Instead, it offers only snapshots of reality in its painful absurdity. Don't read it if you are allergic to foulmouthed morons, though. You will find no break from them in this plot. It is like Twitter gone novel, filled with the raw and unfiltered voices of the characters, presenting a rather unflattering picture of society.

A book jacket review describes this novel as 'Huckleberry Finn meets South Park, with a setting on the Mexican-American border.' Ha!

Vernon God Little is a truly unique and captivating character. He is both profane and humane, making him the perfect narrator for his own story. In a novel filled with villains and despicable characters, Vernon stands out as the only hero.

After being unjustly fingered as an accomplice in a school shooting, Vernon becomes an easy target of a media-crazed, reality-obsessed television culture. The way he navigates through this chaotic and unfair situation is both heart-wrenching and humorous.

Pierre, the author, is a zany, irreverent, and madcap writer. His dialogue is so engaging that it will make you laugh out loud. 'Vernon God Little' is a highly recommended Booker Prize winner that offers a fresh and thought-provoking perspective on modern society.

I have absolutely nothing nice to say about this fucking book.

It is a complete waste of time and money. The story is dull, the characters are uninteresting, and the writing is amateurish.

I couldn't even finish reading it because it was so bad.

I would not recommend this book to anyone, not even my worst enemy.

There are so many other great books out there that are worth reading, and this one is definitely not one of them.

Save your time and energy and pick up a different book.

I will attempt to make this review quite long, so that you will read a realistic account of the quality of this book before you read the boorish and thoughtless dismissals that abound below.

The common thread of said dismissals is a denunciation of 'Vernon God Little' as an unrealistic portrayal of the tragedy of a school shooting, similar to the incident at Columbine High in Colorado some years ago. However, my argument is that 'Vernon God Little' is only barely about a school shooting. It is, in fact, a better overall piece of art than some other works that are more directly about such tragedies.

As I seem to have begun this review with a digression, let me interrupt to share with you a quote from the book that hooked me. On page 6, it says, "Deputy Gurie tears a strip of meat from a bone; it flaps through her lips like a shit taken backwards." That's what you call a gem, and there is one on every page of 'Vernon'.

People seem to think that 'Vernon' was meant to be to the Columbine Massacre as other works were to their respective events, but it's not. The school shooting is just an example of the larger malaise and absurdity that DBC Pierre is pointing at with this book.

This book has the very rare quality of being wildly funny and startlingly meaningful simultaneously. It has been compared to 'A Confederacy of Dunces', and I agree. Although there is much more cursing and sex in 'Vernon', which makes it even better.

Pierre also creates a likable character in Vernon, the sort of main character you can't help but want to see succeed. The narration is in Vernon's dialect, which is both funny and effective in supporting the reader's warm feelings toward him.

The metaphor in 'Vernon' is trashily powerful. For example, something like "The sky was like a bunch of lint balls on a soggy graham cracker."

Suffice it to say, you should read this book and ignore the idea that it is meant to be a paean for the lives lost at Columbine High. It's a masterful farce that you will at least have fun reading, whether you agree with Pierre's assessment of American pop culture or not.

I have no hesitation in admitting that I usually struggle to understand the reasoning behind the decisions of the judges who award the Man Booker Prize. However, on the morning when I opened my newspaper and read that the 2003 award had been given to DBC Pierre's debut novel, Vernon God Little, the spoon I was using to transfer my kiwi yogurt from the bowl on my kitchen table to my mouth suddenly froze in mid-air, about halfway to its destination, even though my mouth remained open. Surely I had misread.

Letting my spoon fall back to my bowl with a clatter, I quickly scanned the article. No, I hadn't misread; Vernon God Little was indeed the recipient of the Man Booker Prize for 2003. Well, I reasoned, one of two things had occurred: (1) Either I had suddenly lost all my ability to distinguish good literature from bad (the more likely option), or (2) the Man Booker judges had. Then I read Professor John Carey's (the Chair's) comment hailing Vernon God Little as “...a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America.” Now, I understood. Perfectly. The British were exacting revenge on the American reading public. But why? I could easily see this coming from the French, whom I admit I adore, but I had always assumed the British and the Americans to be the best of friends. I recently decided to reread the book to see if my feelings about it, after my initial reading, had changed.

Vernon God Little is the first-person narrative of fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little, an extremely unlucky native of the small central Texas town of Martirio and a strange pastiche of Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, Jesse James, and Pat Bateman, the psychotic killer portrayed in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Vernon, or Vern as he prefers to be called, begins his story in a holding room at the local sheriff's office, dressed only in his underwear and his Jordan New Jack Nikes. He'd like to spit polish those New Jack Nikes, but he really doesn't see the point, considering the fact that he's almost naked. He's there, and he's almost naked, simply because his best friend, Jesus Navarro, chose that day to murder sixteen of his classmates before turning the rifle he was using on himself. (Unless one has the arms of a gorilla, I still haven't quite figured out how one turns a rifle on oneself. A handgun, yes. A rifle, no.)

It gives away nothing of the plot to say that, of course, Vern is innocent. He was nowhere near the scene of the crime on the morning of the shooting. He didn't supply Jesus with the murder weapon, as the wife of the local sheriff, for selfish reasons, would like to prove (her belief in Vern's innocence or guilt, in this case, doesn't really matter). No, Vern's only “crime” is being incredibly stupid in refusing to disclose his whereabouts when Jesus Navarro decided it was time, to put it mildly, to go on a rampage.

Maybe you'd be more convinced of Vern's innocence if you heard about it in his own words: Looks like I’m the first one they rounded up so far, he says. I didn’t have anything to do with Tuesday. Still, you wouldn’t want to be here today. Now, I don't know if you've read this book or not, but if you have, and if you're a person of even average intelligence, you'll know Vern is right. About one thing, at least. You wouldn't want to be in Martirio “today.” You wouldn't want to be in Martirio any day.

Stepping into Martirio is like stepping into a cartoonish nightmare world, painted only in violently vivid primary colors. All of its very stereotypical inhabitants seem hell-bent on self-destruction, but not by any conventional means. No, the people of Martirio plan on eating themselves to death, and I really can't say I blame them, although I don't agree with their method. Eating oneself to death, while perhaps providing a certain degree of pleasure in the early stages, seems to me to be a slow, and ultimately, painful way to die, but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. A doublewide is considered a “luxury home” by these fine folk, while beer and barbecue is considered a gourmet meal. Martirio's residents are quite the “gourmets” as well, since all of them are prime candidates for (emergency) bariatric surgery, but alas, none of them has the desire or the necessary funds, and insurance, well, you can just forget about insurance in Martirio. Vern, completely lacking any hometown pride, describes his neighborhood thusly: This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. Okay. I'll take Vern's word for it, although I'm not quite sure what that phrase means, and I really don't think I want to know. Still, I have a feeling that it sums up the town quite nicely.

Vernon—sorry—Vern, also has a definite penchant for self-destruction, for even when he finds himself facing possible execution, he still chooses to remain silent. I can't really say I blame him either, given his options in Martirio, as long as that execution is painless and swift, but honestly, if DBC Pierre really expects his readers to believe that anyone facing execution would choose to keep silent rather than provide an ironclad, though possibly embarrassing, alibi, he's operating under a serious delusion regarding our intelligence and the strength of the human instinct for self-preservation.

While Martirio may be hell for most, it is, of course, considering Vern's plight, nothing short of paradise for those in the media, and they descend on Martirio with all the speed and ferocity of a “Category Four” Texas twister. One, in particular, Eulalio Ledesma, or “Lally,” a representative of an electronics repair firm known as CMN, doesn't bother to correct Martirio's natives when they mistakenly assume he's from CNN. Lally, you see, is determined to make his fame and fortune by creating a whirlwind around Vern, then milking his story for all it's worth, and he uses whatever means he needs to use, ethics be damned. Vern's family, who, given their lack of basic hygiene and problems with morbid obesity, factors that make them seem to have been born sans any sense of shame, nevertheless get so caught up in parading and preening before the cameras like peacocks that Vern is all but forgotten in the shuffle. These people may be hell-bent on self-destruction, but darn it, not before they have their personal fifteen minutes of fame.

To say that Vernon God Little is a fast-paced book is only half true. It's more of a wildly erratic roller coaster ride. Parts of it drag and almost stall, then, almost as an apology for the slow pace, the book lurches forward with a speed I found amazing, though not, by any means, admirable. On the plus side, however, the faster-paced sections did make the book a quicker, and thus, slightly less painful read than it would have been had all of it been slow.

Vern, for all his cynicism, stupidity, and excitability, is nothing if not exuberant. His tirades against, well, everything, were written in a language I've never encountered before…anywhere. I know many Texans have a “twang,” but Vern has that and a great deal more. His language is truly his own. I know it's good to give a character a distinctive voice, but it's not good if that voice can't be understood by anyone other than that character and the writer who created him. After Vern escapes Martirio and goes on the run (this is not a plot spoiler, in fact, I would be remiss not to include it), both he and his language become so overwrought and frenetic that I finally decided that if Vern wasn't going to take his meds, then I, at least, would take mine.

Then there's the profanity. Yes, I was convent educated, and I don't swear, but I've been out in the “real world” for quite some time now. I can recognize profanity in several different languages, but until Vern, I had never known profanity the way he uses it. This book isn't bawdy, bawdiness is something I sometimes like; this book is just plain crude. To show you just how crude, take a look at the example below, and please, keep in mind that this is just one paragraph, not even one page: So much for Mom. She’ll be pumping the town for sympathy, like she does. ‘Well Vern’s just devastated,’ she’ll say. She only calls me Vern around her coffee-morning buddies, to show how ***** tight we are, instead of all laughably ****** up. If my ole lady came with a user’s guide it’d tell you to **** her off in the end, I guarantee it. Everyone knows Jesus is ultimately to blame for Tuesday; but see Mom? Just the fact that I’m helping the investigation is enough to give her ****** Tourette’s Syndrome, or whatever they call the thing where your arms fly around at random. Even more annoying than Vern's near-constant, and horrors, ever-increasing profanity, however, were his many references to, well, to put it politely, his, and his mother's, obsession with Vern's processes of elimination. Vern does have a real problem but it's not a problem I wanted to know about and especially not in such excruciating and exacting detail.

I realize satire demands more license than many other literary styles. I realize that satire is going to present us with characters that are, to some degree, stereotypical. And I don't mind books in which all of the characters are unlikable. But Pierre has simply gone too far over-the-top with Vernon God Little for my taste. The characters are too stereotypical (and there are too many of them), the pacing is too uneven, stalling one minute and lurching forward the next, and the constant profanity “waters it down” and robs it of its power, not to mention the “problems of elimination.” Worse yet, are the extreme plot contrivances and the very disappointing, but totally predictable, ending, an ending we can see coming from (almost) page one. Pierre has left satire behind in Vernon God Little and fallen into caricature and burlesque, instead, and no, I won't forgive him this simply because this book is his debut novel. He's too talented a writer for that.

Given the above, did I find anything at all redeeming in Vernon God Little? Yes, I did. DBC Pierre does show he has much talent and potential, but only if he learns control. He's good at putting a fresh and original spin on the “same old same old,” and some of the metaphors in the book, despite being written in Vern's unique brand of English, show flashes of genuine brilliance. And at times, the skewering of the American media, who really are in dire need of skewering and more, was dead on. Still, the few redeeming qualities I found in Vernon God Little weren't enough for me to give it more than a two-star rating and the recommendation of a pass. In conclusion, I think this novel should come with a large, glow-in-the-dark, non-removable “READ AT YOUR OWN RISK” sticker, sort of like the “Oprah” stickers that won't peel off. If it did, it would certainly be the most redeeming quality of the book and the one for which many of us would feel the most appreciation.

2/5

Recommended: No. Touted as a satirical tragicomedy, this book, while displaying genuine flashes of brilliance is excruciatingly superficial and grating and ultimately crosses the line from satire into caricature and burlesque.

Please read my book reviews and tips for aspiring writers at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com.

I didn't last too long with this one.

To be honest, I can only tolerate an odious central character if the writing itself is not odious.

The story might have had some potential, but the unlikable nature of the main character, combined with what I felt was a lackluster writing style, made it difficult for me to engage.

I found myself constantly frustrated with the actions and decisions of the central figure, and without a captivating narrative to draw me in, I quickly lost interest.

Perhaps if the author had found a way to make the character more redeemable or had employed a more engaging writing technique, I would have been able to stick with it for a longer period.

As it stands, however, this is one book that I will not be revisiting.

Question: Can I read a book where all the women characters are bitches or morons?

Answer: No.

This answer is quite straightforward. It firmly rejects the idea of reading a book that portrays all women characters in such a negative and one-dimensional light. Such a portrayal is not only inaccurate but also unfair and disrespectful to women. Women are diverse individuals with a wide range of personalities, abilities, and qualities. Reducing them all to the stereotypes of bitches or morons is a disservice to their true nature and potential. There are countless books out there that offer more realistic and positive portrayals of women, and it is much more fulfilling and valuable to read those instead.

Some people whose opinions I truly respect have a deep love for this book.

Evidently, I am an outlier. For a Booker Prize Winner, one single review is not going to have any impact on its reception or ratings. However, I despised it.

I loathed the gimmicky aspect, the predictability, and the "what a coincidence" moments. It seems as if the author attempted to cram every negative stereotype of "American modernity" into a single volume.

Look, here is a high school shooting. Here is a kid wrongly accused of murder, with a missing father and an obese mother. Here is the ordinariness of small-town America transforming into a media circus (complete with feuding "school house tragedy" towns). Here are small-town kids having sex to relieve their depression. Here is an escape trip to Mexico. Here is a villainous, no-good womanizer on the prowl who can seduce the poor mother of the "hero." Here is a winking border agent allowing a kid to cross the border alone. Here is a framing for murder complete with seduction. Here is courtroom drama. Here are executions turned into reality television.

Don't look now, but we have a last-minute deathbed pardon and the villain getting his comeuppance.

I understand that it is meant to be a scathing, cynical rebuke of America, "laced with humour and an undeniably vivid portrayal of the impact of media and fame." I understand that I am supposed to appreciate the prose, the unique voice of the protagonist, and the flowery syntax. But seriously, I clearly prefer subtlety and the freedom to draw my own conclusions rather than being bombarded with one dead, stinky fish after another.

What’s the Booker Prize, and why did Vernon God Little win it?

Well, let me start from the beginning. We’ll come to the Booker Prize in a few paragraphs. I read Vernon God Little partly because the novel was recommended in 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, which is a handy reference when I’m at the library and can’t decide on a book :

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45...

The novel’s storyline follows a typical “outside teenage male observing the world” path. Mr. Pierre might consider sending a percentage of his royalties to the Salinger estate. When people compare this book to Catcher in the Rye, I think they’re doing so mainly because they’re both first-person outsider young adult male narrated, not because they’re of the same caliber. Vernon, unlike Holden, lives in Texas with his mother after a Columbinesque tragedy committed by his best friend. As the town grapples with the media and the insidious urge to find a scapegoat, the title character navigates a landscape where the blame is mostly pinned on him, seemingly because he’s not loudly proclaiming his innocence. He escapes from his tract house to Houston and then to Mexico, encountering shady television producers, the girl who was once his dream, and hermits who are into amputee porn. The author sometimes resorts to a lazy magical realism to cover what seem like implausible plot developments, but the storyline progresses based on Pierre’s sharp observations. For example, he describes the smell of real life as similar to that of escalator motors. Pierre writes well paragraph by paragraph, and I was engaged enough in the plot to read the last eighty pages on a steaming Sunday under the gazebo on the back porch.

But the Booker Prize? Isn’t it supposed to be a big deal? Coetzee’s Disgrace won four years before Vernon God Little, and people on Goodreads went crazy over that novel. I really don’t know why Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize. Was 2003 a slow literary year? I have a theory about the Booker win. It’s based on the claim (which I must admit isn’t very well supported) that the prize committee is in London, and Vernon God Little might fit a European perception of American white trash that international readers might find interesting. Americans love reading books and watching movies about underdogs trapped by birth in depressing circumstances in other countries (think of the vastly overrated Slumdog Millionaire), so why can’t other countries’ cultural consumers pick over our bones and feel superior about small town Texans overeating and shooting each other? I don’t mind. Texas kind of feels like a foreign country to me anyway, partly because I’ve only visited once and never left the airport. So I guess Vernon God Little is a decent book with some strong language and excellent passages, but it doesn’t seem worthy of being mentioned as a big prize winner or one of the thousand books you have to read before you die. And if the Booker Prize committee wants to take a look at American white trash culture, I’ll be happy to pick them up at O’Hare and drive them around for a couple of hours. Or they could order pizza and watch Cops. Whichever works. We’re here for you, Europe. Thanks for the Booker, even if I’m not sure Mr. Pierre deserved it.

This book presents a rather unflattering picture of American society, filled with swearing, cruelty, greed, gluttony, fraud, jealousy, false friendship, and one-upmanship.

There is very little laughter or joy to lighten the mood of the story. Halfway through, it dawned on me that the back cover and the pages of press citations in the front of the book conveniently omit the elephant in the room, which is the high-school massacre.

As the book progresses, I come to realize that this omission is actually a good thing. The book doesn't really cover the massacre at all, nor does it attempt to. Instead, it serves more as an indictment of trial by media and the persecution of someone who is perceived as guilty by the world without a proper trial.

I suspect that if this book hadn't been included in the 1001 books and won the Man Booker Prize, I might have given up on it. As it is, I feel that the last third of the book showcases DBC Pierre's talent more than the rest, leaving me to wonder if the Man Booker jury might have only read the beginning and the end!

I suppose it is quite an accomplishment for a British author to attempt to write in the style of a teenager from Texas, but that doesn't necessarily mean the writing is of high quality. Perhaps when he writes in his own voice, I will have a greater appreciation for his style.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/8...

Vernon Gregory Little, Vernon Genius Little, Vernon Gone-to-hell Little, Vernon Gates Little, Vernon Godzilla Little, Vernon Gonzalez Little - throughout the book, he undergoes a transformation and finally becomes Vernon GOD Little at the ending.

The writing style of this book is truly remarkable. It is filled with humor, wit, and irony, showing a great deal of intelligence. The author has managed to create a story that is not only entertaining but also thought-provoking.

In my opinion, the story is even better put together than The Catcher in the Rye. The plot is engaging from start to finish, with well-developed characters and a unique setting. The climax is extremely gripping, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good read with a touch of humor and a lot of heart. It is a book that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.