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Vernon God Little Paperback – Bargain Price, June 15, 2004
| DBC Pierre (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funny look at violence, materialism, and the American media.
- Print length300 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJune 15, 2004
- Dimensions8.08 x 5.72 x 0.82 inches
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Pierre renders adolescence brilliantly, capturing with seeming effortlessness the bright, contradictory hormone rush of teenage life." (The New York Times Book Review )
"An unexpectedly moving first novel ... Raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental in about equal measure." (Joyce Carol Oates The New Yorker )
From the Back Cover
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. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico.
Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funny look at violence, materialism, and the American media.
Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel
A New York Times Notable Book
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
DBC Pierre is the pen name of Peter Finlay, who was born in Australia in 1961 and divided most of the first twenty-three years of his life between Texas and Mexico City. He lives in Ireland.
About the Author
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Product details
- ASIN : B003L1ZYPG
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (June 15, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 300 pages
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.08 x 5.72 x 0.82 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

DBC Pierre was a late surprise or an accident (depending on who you ask), for a bomber-pilot-turned-scientist, and an air-traffic-controller-turned-pianist with an all-female swing band, in Australia in 1961. Barely two years later, Pierre's father (who had christened him Peter, though it didn't stick past his teens) shot a picture of his child in Washington, USA, for the cover of Pierre's first novel, Vernon God Little, which went on to win the Man Booker Prize.
Except his father hadn't known where the picture would end up, and it took thirty-six more years for Pierre to write the novel, or to even realise he had to write a novel. In those intervening years he had grown up in Mexico - or had made an unconvincing attempt at it - had lived in half a dozen countries besides, had gotten into trouble and gotten back out of it, had been a cartoonist, a photographer, a designer and filmmaker, had been sniped with a gun by his neighbour (they were friends after that), had virtually died in a terrible car accident, and had been bitten by a vampire bat. And that all generated a pile of observations and feelings.
All that combustion has to go somewhere, so it goes into books. Pierre takes special pleasure in breathing life into his writing, all the curious laws of personal physics, of mad contemporary life, that nobody can really explain; and he particularly loves the magical meeting of minds between writer and reader, sharing adventures together in silence.
There's a corner on a street at sundown, a spat at a battered table, an epiphany after some dusty caper resolves in one of his works - where he hopes to meet you too.
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But from almost the first page all my hopes fell apart. For one, all of the supporting characters were so flat and one-dimensional that not a single one contained more than one personality or character trait. Taking place in Central Texas, the writer writes every character as if they are very very dumb. They speak dumbly and they do dumb things and they aren’t at all interesting to read about. I thought to myself that maybe this was some kind of parody the writer was attempting, in the vein of let us say John Waters or something, and that maybe he was actually from Texas and had lived among these kinds of people. So I start reading about him, and it turns out he’s from Australia, which in a twisted kind of way makes sense, because it really did read like how a foreigner might view people who live in Texas, without ever actually having met one. So that was one issue.
Another had to do with scene-setting. The writer didn’t have a clue how to build a scene from the ground up. Half of the time as a reader I didn’t even know where I was. Characters popped in and out of existence at will, like cartoon characters, and always the same characters. For example, two women might be speaking for five pages in a living room, and then suddenly another character chimes in that had apparently been sitting there the whole time but was not mentioned until they started speaking. Then we’d flip to a scene happening somewhere else simultaneously, and one of the characters from that scene in the living room would just be there in this other scene as well, without rhyme or reason. It was very odd.
Then there is the issue of plausibility. Nothing about this story rang as remotely true. I understand that some of it was meant to be a parody, but it doesn’t flesh out the parody consistently enough to allow for other sins to be forgiven. We have a teenager here accused of being an accomplice to murder, and he constantly is walking in and out of the police station and flying under the police’s radar, being treated by his family and friends as though nothing that occurred to him was really that big of a deal, living their lives normally while this big event hangs over the town. It seemed the writer lacked any real understanding of the criminal justice system, and later Death Row, and of all the things that would be required of a fifteen year-old attempting to flee the country.
If I sound bitter, it is because this book should have been so much better than it was. It was almost entirely made up of nonsense. I feel like my intelligence has been insulted. With that, I’m signing off!
Having said that, the tone of the novel changed dramatically half-way through the story: It looks as though Vernon Gregory Little is the one who's going to be taking all the heat for a recent shooting-spree at his school in Texas. Vernon flees to Mexico and by the time he's back home, nearly all of southern Texas' murders have been blamed on him.
While Vernon was in Mexico, story mellowed out a little and Pierre took his time to describe the country in wonderful detail. And, back home, when Vernon's in jail and on trial, his reflections are more profound. All of this was way better reading than the white-trash/empty scenario that is the first-half of Vernon God Little.
If you've got nothing else to read, by all means, pick this book up (just wait until paperback).
Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vain Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do: he takes of for Mexico.
I like this book because the author needs few words to characterize the 'white trash' background and to describe the feelings of Vernon who is about to be accused of murder.
If nothing else, this book reads like an engrossing mystery novel. One thing though: the novel doesn't ask much intellectual firepower to read it but is that so bad?
I could not maintain my interest in the plot. Sorry. I know it is difficult to write a book, but I think this needed editing. Hope the author finds some happiness with his prize money, and his next project finds a better editor. This is unlikely, since he did win a big prize for this mess. Go figure.
Top reviews from other countries
I understand why it won the Man Booker and Whitbread prize in 2003. Wonderful first novel.
This was a reread because I was blown away when it was first released
I remembered it being a book which might offer some fresh philosophical insights and reflections.
The book has a prediction type narrative around reality TV and media and bizarre legal processes and proceedings.
Didn't have the same impact second time round, mostly because America has out-Trumped the plot
Felt a little tame in it's predictions of the horror facing American society.
Holden Caulfield dreamed of paradise in a field of rye; Vernon aspires to a beach hut in Mexico (in the company of the gorgeous Taylor Figueroa). Holden derided the phoney adults around him; Vern is well aware of the corruption in the media, everyone out to make a buck. Both characters retain a touching naivety that keeps the reader rooting for them throughout. Brilliant.
Love the story telling and they way it is set in the now even with it being written about 2decades ago everything is still so relevant










