Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death (Man Booker Prize)

When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday's underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico.

Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funny look at violence, materialism, and the American media.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Yeah, I Was Surprised, 2008-08-22
Didn't love it, didn't hate it....the writing style blares at you. Sentences are sometimes funny/clever, sometimes overly "poetic" in a melodramatic way that actually affected my gag reflexes. Few times the writer uses a more UK word that didn't fit....like, would a Texas teenager call dollars "banknotes"? I found myself pausing and mentally trying to make excuses for the word....maybe Vernon watched a lot of BBC America? Maybe he heard someone say it in class...possibly he read it even though he's not really what you'd call a scholar, but at times somehow too "wise" for his overall character...The description for the book here at goodreads begins "surprise winner of Booker prize"...yeah, I was surprised...shocked even, after reading it. I had higher hopes for the novel because I usually really enjoy Booker prize winners and the concept of the novel sounded really interesting. I found that around page 150 I was really laboring to get through the rest, having come too far to abandon it at that point.


0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Vernon Little is a teenage version of Hunter S. Thompson, 2008-02-26
Surprise Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this satire about a Columbine-like school shooting has moments of brilliance, and equal moments of tedium. Overall, the first-person narrative about a massacre in small-town Texas is swiftly moving, entertaining, and full of clever jabs at Hicksville, U.S.A., the media and the legal system. Told by Vernon Little, a 16-yr. old witness to the murders at his high school -- the gunman his best friend, Jesus -- the narration is written in a slap-dash, hip, disaffected voice that at turns feels like a teenage version of Hunter S. Thompson, but with a style unique to the author himself (in this first novel by Australian Peter Finlay, under the pen name DBC Pierre).

The first 150 pages barrel along; the next 50 meander a bit; then the final 75 come flashing forth in a fevered run to expose all the secrets and tie up all the loose ends. A satisfying climax and, though definitely not for all tastes, a recommend.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

An animated novel that offers base insights to sleazy human actions. , 2008-01-10
Vernon God Little is a dissecting and vitriolic literary overview of the modern American culture and its media obsessed thirst for celebrity, looks, and fame (both good and bad). Though, to some extent the novel is minutely inflated, DBC Pierre, the pseudonym for Peter Finlay, it does indeed touch a nerve that internally says, "Finlay's not too far off the mark."

Vernon God Little takes place on school grounds, and when sixteen kids are murdered in a rage killing, Vernon Little, because he was on friendly terms with the student killer and had some insights on the boiling rage that seethed inside him, becomes suspect number one, all due to police incompetence, unrestrained media involvement and witnesses who give false testimony. When all that is merged into the pot and heaped against a boy who is not fully developed intellectually and in many other respects, DBC Pierre, creates and an almost credible scenario for his protagonist, a skittish flight to Mexico, an escape from the dominating lights, cameras and ridiculously incessant "How do you feel?" questions that reporters and media personnel often like to harass citizens and victims with.

The dialogue of the novel is realistically imbued with hard bitten and cynical indifference, for the act of murder is not really murder to some people; it is unreality. The conveyance of genuine human suffering by those left behind after an unimaginable tragedy is in some skewered perception of folks not of grief but an acting competition for who can obtain the most time on camera. DBC Pierre conveys that observation very very well; it is one of the hard truths laced throughout the book.

Vernon God Little my not be one of the best novels to have won England's preeminent writing prize-the Man Booker-but it sure did earn its nomination, for it is brooding, crude, acerbic, all the fancy terminology; it does reflect-sad to admit-our present-day-culture. And when a novelist (not to mention a first timer) is able to convey an unpleasant truth (even if we want to ignore it), you have to admit, that's one hell of an achievement!


0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Interesting, but not great, 2007-11-14
This book is considered a satire, but really good, modern satire optimally has one foot in reality (i.e., The White House Mess, Thank You for Not Smoking). Even though the author takes great leaps into the sea of outrageous and ridiculous, there are so many holes in the plot where it is supposed to be realistic that it is distracting. For instance, the narrator is a high school student who witnesses the end of a shooting at his high school and is accused of it, but apparently there are no witnesses that saw what happened. But those who die are only those in his physics class and they fled the classroom to the front lawn of the school. So, even though the shots are loud, no one in the whole school, or outside it, saw what was going on? The plot's more stupid than biting in parts, and parts are a bit disgusting, but the protagonist and his narrator's voice are fascinating. In brief, I'm surprised that it won the Booker Prize. But while it's not particularly enjoyable or great, it's generally well-written.


2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Vernon God Little: Worth Not Very Much, 2007-10-13
What a strange book! A surprise winner of the 2003 Booker Prize and certainly not what I expected.

I suspect that many people, particularly the prudish and easily offended, will be aghast at the book and mark it down accordingly. I am not in that camp. The use of four letter words is fine depending on context and, in the context of this book, they are of no problem. The book, however, can be marked down for other reasons.

I found the plot to be confusing. I found the characters to be little more than caricature. In fact, except for a brief section well into the book where Vernon is arrested in Mexico, I really couldn't wait for the torment to be over. Quite simply, this book has been given way too much hype.

Having laid my cards on the table, this will still not turn people off the book. My opinion counts for little in comparison with a Booker Prize. Regardless, you have been warned!

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