A Talk With Booker Prize Nabber and Ex-Layabout DBC Pierre
Douglas Wolk
Tuesday, October 28th 2003
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photo: The Bookseller, London
Lucky Pierre, high on the hog
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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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