At first I found Vernon God Little to be rough going. The narrative voice — a popcultch-saturated south Texas adolescent idiom — took some getting used to. The novel is a post-mass-murder burlesque, hilarious in spots, but not even remotely credible. Vernon God Little won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, but I wonder whether the novel would be so highly regarded by English literati if it had portrayed England the way it portrays the U.S — as a country where everyone, every single person, is either a pederast, an idiot, a con-man, a traitor, an opportunist, an incompetent, or just fat, lovelorn, vicious and vacant. The pseudonymous DBC Pierre, an Australian, seems to have acquired all his information about the United States from watching trash TV. He’s written a funny book, because caricature can be very amusing, but I hope that unwary Europeans and Asians who read Vernon God Little don’t think that they’ve entered the heart of America, because they sure as hell haven’t. Caveant lectores. I wonder also about the novel’s thick impasto of Christian symbolism. Vernon lives on Beulah Lane in a town called Martirio; he calls himself a "skategoat." Will he die for America’s vulgarities? And are we supposed to take seriously Vernon’s last-minute conversion to faith? I couldn’t — in fact, the last-chapter Hollywood ending seemed to me mighty meretricious.
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