Jumping the Border: DBC Pierre's Novel Debut
Peter Finlay, after apparently living through an exciting life in which hard drugs and treasure hunting featured among other things, was left hurtling toward his forties with an ungodly debt and the nickname Dirty But Clean Pierre. So he moved to Ireland and wrote a book. The book attracted a lot of attention, and soon won the Man Booker Award, Britain's most esteemed literary award, furthering the conviction that in a post-Pynchon literary world the emphasis will be placed on plot. This book doesn't cater to deconstructionist criticism, perhaps to any criticism. And it is a good book, a very good book.
Vernon God Little has been compared to South Park for its gruesome, biting sarcasm and over-the-top culture riffing. The book does not attack targets as specifically as South Park does, but Pierre's writing might if exercised in the serial format. The main satirical figures in the book are deplorable for their solipsism, and placed in rural American culture in the 90's, they take the quickest and easiest routes to self-promotion, and it is hard not to find an echo of the bleaker aspects of our culture there, from the investigative reporting, politics, privately-funded prisons, to the everyday interactions weighed down with evangelical clichés and shallow materialistic boasts. The story is told from the point of view its protagonist and the book's namesake, Vernon G. Little, a Texan teen whose tumbleweed existence has been put under a microscope after his best and possibly only friend goes on a homicidal killing spree through their high-school before committing suicide. Vernon is a pretty pathetic hero. He has bowel control problems. His family situation is far from respectable. His first name suggests the Ernest P. Worrell's invisible pal, "Know what I mean, Vern?" and his last name suggests a lacking in stature. The middle initial, G., serves as a kind of billboard and open ended satire directed against himself. He comes from a desperate town thrown into desperate times, and the story proceeds always with the possibility that he could share the fate of Jesus Navarro, or just be some sad twisted redneck somewhere.
The narrative structure of Vernon God Little is one of the most fascinating aspects of its telling. Pierre manages to write a book that, like many classics, mirrors its own narrative powers in the materials of the plot, without seeming stale or recalling other authors. If anything, it bears comparison to A Confederacy of Dunces, which Pierre has attested to his ignorance of. The Booker Prize chair, John Carey, wrote that Pierre's language was reminiscent of that in Shakespeare's day for its inventiveness. It is inventive, not more than most twelve year olds and not nearly so much as Pynchon or Sterne for its lexicon, but it has used, as Peter Brooks wrote about Todorov, "the linguistic model in somewhat playful ways, accepting it as a necessary basis for thought but opening up its implications in an engagement with the reading of texts."
The plot unravels to illuminate the main character following a chain of events that begins after the shock of the shootout, the big bang which begins this story, as the delay of several days between the event and the novel's narrated beginning may denote. From this beginning the fragmented world is put together to eventually reveal in stark detail what happened at the high-school that day, but only after the motives and causes come into the light. This is a metaphor of dealing with grief, but also of the basic condition of narrative, to reconstruct and organize using the twin strands of chronological events and narrative events, what the senses experience and what the mind experiences, held in suspense against each other. You could even say that these two strands are like the twin spiraling DNA that has become the buzzword in courtrooms and cutting edge of the human endeavor to clarify our character. The moment of guilt or innocence is not clarified until late in the book, when it is soon displaced until the end of the book, becoming the even more immediate concern will I be dead soon? And so what? It is the progression of the narrator's concern from trivial matters (marijuana in a shoe-box in his closet) to this latter inspirational concern (death) which marks one aspect of Vernon's transformation to adulthood.
Whatever wisdom is gained at the end of the novel is asserted as a transformation of one sensibility to another, such as the perception of Clarence the ax-murderer; what began as a myth is transformed into tangible wisdom which leads into the novel's resolution. The transformations from innocence to guilt, and from childhood to maturity mark the narrative desire which is the heart of this novel, churning it forward in a heady rush of smart-ass acumen and soaring hormones. This transformation comes about not easily, as Vernon's seeming ability to stand all matter of assaults to his dignity without hope of recourse.
When he finally does run away he contacts Taylor, the girl with whom he experienced his first sexual awakening, an inebriated proposition on her part which he turned down. The fantasies aroused by her have all the markings of masturbation fantasies, and the share the paranoia and guilt which shadow such fantasies. When he goes to see her he is shadowed by Leona, one of his mother's friends who has becomes one of the investigative-reporting henchmen looking to make a dollar off his story, who nearly finds him, as if the guiltiness of his desire were nearly fact. Later in Mexico when they are intimate in a hotel, we witness his first sexual experience as it unfolds. This is a loaded moment; his dick, usually referred to as his "boy" gets referred to as his "man;" for in American culture sexual maturity is as close as many people get to a right of passage. But this is not a love born from any sense of devotion or otherness, it is a fantasy imposed on real life. When he lies and tells her he killed for her he becomes what she was to him, a fantasy, a lie, and then; "a new reality seeps into me, heavy like the beginning of an infection. Suddenly her pout turns to rubber, her breeze to raw shrimp and metal-butter." Taylor, the beautiful bubbly Victoria Secret girl interested in Public Relations, plays countertenor to Ella, the promiscuous neighborhood girl, and between them the issue of prostitution is given an interesting display that deserves further comment somewhere else.
While Vern's course to manhood takes a messy route through his sexual fantasies, it importantly also means jumping the border. What this act amounts to for Vernon is nothing short of total defiance against his community and "peers," one that gives him freedom and also knowledge of how the world works outside his home. No more pampering. He is forced to sell the basketball shoes that had so much credibility in his high-school crowd; in mexico they establish credit at a bar in order for him to order drinks and ultimately strike up a friendship with Victor, a truck driver heading south, that will bring him to the possibility of freedom. The vehicle that he travels in is emblazoned with the words me vez y sufres [see me and suffer], and just as the vehicle takes him closer to freedom in body, the motto takes him closer to the freedom of a clear conscience.
What borders do we face in a work of literature that must be overcome? One of them is the intellectual border that can separate an author from the subjects he is describing, and lack of ability to cross that border result usually in stale prose, especially when it comes to dialogue, which this book is full of. They may also result in a sort of solipsism where the border between an author's mind and the world become insurmountable, as Nietzche in his late works. The border that is crossed in the story mirrors the consciousness of DBC Pierre in his writing; one gets a sense of a porous and flexible mind which allows in all sorts of slang, country western music, cultural slag, and images, and lets out the strange characters that inhabits Little's world. It is ultimately this step of crossing the border that makes Little into a hero, and fulfills his story, because it so accurately describes the mechanism by which his existence has come about.
Vernon God Little has been compared to South Park for its gruesome, biting sarcasm and over-the-top culture riffing. The book does not attack targets as specifically as South Park does, but Pierre's writing might if exercised in the serial format. The main satirical figures in the book are deplorable for their solipsism, and placed in rural American culture in the 90's, they take the quickest and easiest routes to self-promotion, and it is hard not to find an echo of the bleaker aspects of our culture there, from the investigative reporting, politics, privately-funded prisons, to the everyday interactions weighed down with evangelical clichés and shallow materialistic boasts. The story is told from the point of view its protagonist and the book's namesake, Vernon G. Little, a Texan teen whose tumbleweed existence has been put under a microscope after his best and possibly only friend goes on a homicidal killing spree through their high-school before committing suicide. Vernon is a pretty pathetic hero. He has bowel control problems. His family situation is far from respectable. His first name suggests the Ernest P. Worrell's invisible pal, "Know what I mean, Vern?" and his last name suggests a lacking in stature. The middle initial, G., serves as a kind of billboard and open ended satire directed against himself. He comes from a desperate town thrown into desperate times, and the story proceeds always with the possibility that he could share the fate of Jesus Navarro, or just be some sad twisted redneck somewhere.
The narrative structure of Vernon God Little is one of the most fascinating aspects of its telling. Pierre manages to write a book that, like many classics, mirrors its own narrative powers in the materials of the plot, without seeming stale or recalling other authors. If anything, it bears comparison to A Confederacy of Dunces, which Pierre has attested to his ignorance of. The Booker Prize chair, John Carey, wrote that Pierre's language was reminiscent of that in Shakespeare's day for its inventiveness. It is inventive, not more than most twelve year olds and not nearly so much as Pynchon or Sterne for its lexicon, but it has used, as Peter Brooks wrote about Todorov, "the linguistic model in somewhat playful ways, accepting it as a necessary basis for thought but opening up its implications in an engagement with the reading of texts."
The plot unravels to illuminate the main character following a chain of events that begins after the shock of the shootout, the big bang which begins this story, as the delay of several days between the event and the novel's narrated beginning may denote. From this beginning the fragmented world is put together to eventually reveal in stark detail what happened at the high-school that day, but only after the motives and causes come into the light. This is a metaphor of dealing with grief, but also of the basic condition of narrative, to reconstruct and organize using the twin strands of chronological events and narrative events, what the senses experience and what the mind experiences, held in suspense against each other. You could even say that these two strands are like the twin spiraling DNA that has become the buzzword in courtrooms and cutting edge of the human endeavor to clarify our character. The moment of guilt or innocence is not clarified until late in the book, when it is soon displaced until the end of the book, becoming the even more immediate concern will I be dead soon? And so what? It is the progression of the narrator's concern from trivial matters (marijuana in a shoe-box in his closet) to this latter inspirational concern (death) which marks one aspect of Vernon's transformation to adulthood.
Whatever wisdom is gained at the end of the novel is asserted as a transformation of one sensibility to another, such as the perception of Clarence the ax-murderer; what began as a myth is transformed into tangible wisdom which leads into the novel's resolution. The transformations from innocence to guilt, and from childhood to maturity mark the narrative desire which is the heart of this novel, churning it forward in a heady rush of smart-ass acumen and soaring hormones. This transformation comes about not easily, as Vernon's seeming ability to stand all matter of assaults to his dignity without hope of recourse.
When he finally does run away he contacts Taylor, the girl with whom he experienced his first sexual awakening, an inebriated proposition on her part which he turned down. The fantasies aroused by her have all the markings of masturbation fantasies, and the share the paranoia and guilt which shadow such fantasies. When he goes to see her he is shadowed by Leona, one of his mother's friends who has becomes one of the investigative-reporting henchmen looking to make a dollar off his story, who nearly finds him, as if the guiltiness of his desire were nearly fact. Later in Mexico when they are intimate in a hotel, we witness his first sexual experience as it unfolds. This is a loaded moment; his dick, usually referred to as his "boy" gets referred to as his "man;" for in American culture sexual maturity is as close as many people get to a right of passage. But this is not a love born from any sense of devotion or otherness, it is a fantasy imposed on real life. When he lies and tells her he killed for her he becomes what she was to him, a fantasy, a lie, and then; "a new reality seeps into me, heavy like the beginning of an infection. Suddenly her pout turns to rubber, her breeze to raw shrimp and metal-butter." Taylor, the beautiful bubbly Victoria Secret girl interested in Public Relations, plays countertenor to Ella, the promiscuous neighborhood girl, and between them the issue of prostitution is given an interesting display that deserves further comment somewhere else.
While Vern's course to manhood takes a messy route through his sexual fantasies, it importantly also means jumping the border. What this act amounts to for Vernon is nothing short of total defiance against his community and "peers," one that gives him freedom and also knowledge of how the world works outside his home. No more pampering. He is forced to sell the basketball shoes that had so much credibility in his high-school crowd; in mexico they establish credit at a bar in order for him to order drinks and ultimately strike up a friendship with Victor, a truck driver heading south, that will bring him to the possibility of freedom. The vehicle that he travels in is emblazoned with the words me vez y sufres [see me and suffer], and just as the vehicle takes him closer to freedom in body, the motto takes him closer to the freedom of a clear conscience.
What borders do we face in a work of literature that must be overcome? One of them is the intellectual border that can separate an author from the subjects he is describing, and lack of ability to cross that border result usually in stale prose, especially when it comes to dialogue, which this book is full of. They may also result in a sort of solipsism where the border between an author's mind and the world become insurmountable, as Nietzche in his late works. The border that is crossed in the story mirrors the consciousness of DBC Pierre in his writing; one gets a sense of a porous and flexible mind which allows in all sorts of slang, country western music, cultural slag, and images, and lets out the strange characters that inhabits Little's world. It is ultimately this step of crossing the border that makes Little into a hero, and fulfills his story, because it so accurately describes the mechanism by which his existence has come about.
posted by Nick Gardner at 8:54 PM
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