SHOWTIME.('Vernon God Little')(Book Review)

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 adult world that surrounds him is savagely satiric: "This is how I'm being grown up, this is my fucken struggle for learnings and glory. A gumbo of lies, cellulite, and fucken 'Wuv.' "

Pierre has a flawless ear for adolescent-boy speech. To his young narrator, virtually every adjective is "fucken" and every vision of every adult is laced with repugnance, especially those adults in authority: "Deputy Gurie tears a strip of meat from a bone; it flaps through her lips like a shit taken backwards." And, "A strip of buffalo leather scrapes into the room, tacked around the soul of Sheriff Porkornay."

Though Vernon loves his overweight, comically self-pitying mother, he smolders at her emotional blackmail of him, which he shrewdly assesses as a mother's way of infantilizing a maturing, potentially rebellious son: "It's like she planted a knife in my back when I was born, and now every fucken noise she makes just gives it a turn." Vernon's fury at his mother inspires some of the novel's funniest rants:

I'll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting shit into a humongous web, just like spiders. It's true. They take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn't matter what words you say, you feel it on your blade. Like, "Wow, see that car?" "Well it's the same blue as that jacket you threw up on at the Christmas show, remember?" What I learned is that parents succeed by managing the database of your dumbness and your slime, ready for combat. They'll cut you down in a split fucken second, make no mistake; much quicker than you'd use the artillery you dream about.

Vernon is a Holden Caulfield on amphetamines, with "lawless brown hair, the eyelashes of a camel. big ole puppy-dog features like God made me through a fucken magnifying glass. You know right away my movie's the one where I puke on my legs."