A Talk With Booker Prize Nabber and Ex-Layabout DBC Pierre

A A A Comments By Douglas Wolk Tuesday, Oct 28 2003

"The voice came out first," says DBC Pierre, after a party in New York to celebrate winning the Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Little. "I wrote the first draft in about five weeks. Then I had to spend a lot of months basically learning to write." Pierre (real name: Peter Finlay) grew up in Mexico among American expats, spent a few decades as a cartoonist, photographer, con man, and layabout, ended up with an Australian accent, and began the book in England just before his 38th birthday.

photo: The Bookseller, London

Lucky Pierre, high on the hog

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Vernon God Little
By DBC Pierre
Canongate, 277 pp., $23

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Unsurprisingly, Vernon Little's polymorphous voice is the star of the novel. Little is a pissy, malapropism-prone 15-year-old Texan whose favorite word is fucken, and he's smart-mouthed himself into becoming a "skate-goat" for a high school massacre. But he's also shit-faced high on language, and observant beyond his powers of description, which gives his simmeringly funny monologue the scent of cracked poetry: "Velcro fucken ant-farms seize my gut."

Set in a landscape of Bar-B-Chew Barns and overpriced sneakers, Vernon's satire is almost too fast to steer, culminating in a merciless slapstick cluster bombing of "reality entertainment" 's scatological vulgarity. Pierre claims, though, "I never set out to write a comedy—even to the last, I thought it was a hyper-colored, very loud, but quite photo-realistic account. It was only afterwards that I looked back and noticed it." The targets of his jokes are the broadest barn doors of only-in-America culture, and the story of the kid's ambition, escape, and media crucifixion is a classic American narrative, but its sustained farce is very much in the British tradition of Waugh. Does Pierre think of Vernon as a British or an American book? "That's as hard as the question of where I come from," he says. "It's got an informed detachment, if you know what I mean."

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