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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
John Lanchester on the poetry and madness of John Clare
"It's hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news." So begins "Vernon God Little" (Canongate; $23), a frenetic yet unexpectedly moving first novel by the pseudonymous D. B. C. Pierre, this year's dark-horse Booker Prize winner. Narrated in the highly idiomatic voice of Vernon Gregory Little, a fifteen-year-old Texas boy whose rotten luck it is to find himself a "skate-goat" in the aftermath of a Columbine-type massacre of sixteen high-school students committed by his best friend, "Vernon God Little" is raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental in about equal measure.
D. B. C. (the initials stand for "Dirty But Clean") Pierre was born Peter Finlay, in 1961, in Australia, but was brought as an infant to live in the United States and then Mexico; he spent his teen-age years in Mexico City, and as an adult he has lived in London, Australia, and Ireland. One of Pierre's ongoing preoccupations is drawing cartoons, an ideal background for the creator of the foulmouthed but subtle-minded Vernon, whose vision of the...
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