Vernon God Little: a 21st century comedy in the presence of death

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When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday's underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice.

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Theodore Dalrymple wrote that the novel "was a work of unutterably tedious nastiness and vulgarity" that "manifested itself even in its first sentence, and grew worse as the first paragraph progressed"; Dalrymple described the author as "a man with no discernible literary talent whose vulgarity of mind was deep and thoroughgoing". [3] In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani concluded that "In trying to score a lot of obvious points off a lot of obvious targets, Mr. Pierre may have won the Booker Prize and ratified some ugly stereotypes of Americans, but he hasn't written a terribly convincing or compelling novel." [4] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations [ edit ] The closest I can get is to say it's like 'Catcher In The Rye' if it had been written by Warren Ellis. My family planted the idea that I could do anything, and I want to apologise for taking them so literally"I drag the crusty edge of a T-shirt over my eyes, and try to get over things. I should clean up my mess, seeing as everybody's so antsy, but I feel like smeared shit. Then a learning jumps to mind, that once you plan to do something, and figure how long it'll take, that's exactly how long Fate gives you before the next thing comes along to do.

Vernon God Little, By DBC Pierre By DBC Nick Hern Books | Vernon God Little, By DBC Pierre By DBC

Humor and mass murder make for strange bedfellows, and first-timer Pierre fails to find the tone that might harmonize them. DBC Pierre was born in 1961 in Reynella, Australia. He was brought up in Mexico and the UK, and now lives in Ireland. I try to think where those people are. But the memory doesn't come to my brain, it comes to my eye as a tear that shoots from my lash like a soggy bullet. I sit stunned.

I'm a kid whose best friend took a gun into his mouth and blew off his hair, whose classmates are dead, who's being blamed for it all, who broke his mama's heart John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at University of Oxford and chairman of Man Booker judges in 2003, said: "Reading [Pierre's] book made me think of how the English language was in Shakespeare's day, enormously free and inventive and very idiomatic and full of poetry as well." [ citation needed] Fiction, particularly sharp-eyed satire, can puncture the membrane of self-satisfaction that keeps us from seeing our own flaws and pathologies, but the Booker judges have erred if they hoped to convey that message. As Vern observes, "Where TV lets you down, I'm discovering, is by not convincing you how things really work in the world." The same might be said for some award-winning novels.