DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little begins with some irredeemably and incorrigibly funny lines like,
“Don’t even try to guess who stood all Tuesday night in the road. Clue: snotty ole Mrs. Lechuga. Hard to tell if she quivered, or if moths and porchlight through the willows ruffled her skin like a funeral satin in a gale”
Although the humor is strictly of the tits‘n’ass variety, and not everyone would appreciate it, Vernon God Little, is packed with at least one real funny line that will have you guffawing on each of its page.
And sadly, that’s just about where the Pros of this book end
So, read this one only as just another book (if you must that is) and maybe you will enjoy it. If read as a Booker Prize winner, one is bound to get a feeling of being taken for a ride.
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Some books seem to have been written with the express purpose of earning a fat royalty when it is made into a movie. Vernon God Little falls exactly in that category. Large parts of it almost read like a screenplay.
Vernon God Little is a black comedy, brimming with conduct considered grossly wrong and shocking. It is a vicious satire on American life. It points how law enforcement and court proceedings, have become a source of entertainment in the country and is an incision into ‘Reality TV’ and the media hysteria that envelops crime. An indecent pointer to an unpalatable reality.
It is the story of high school kid, Vernon, the friend of Jesus, an unpopular kid in school and the perpetrator of a school massacre. Vernon is wrongly accused of the massacre and the entire book is a first person account from Vernon frantically trying to prove his innocence.
Though the book does pick up some tempo once it reaches the actual court proceedings, this would be one instance where the movie (when it comes) would be better than the book, I guess.
Recommended only for those who follow the Bookers (you are bound to get sorely disappointed), or those who dig this kind of humor.
Other than being graced with a forced, but surely extremely funny line on every other page, one does not get much satisfaction reading Vernon God Little, and less than half way through it I wished I hadn’t even bothered with it.
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