Well, I’ve spent a week or so with Vernon God Little stuck in my head since finishing it in record time. I have to say I loved it. All except the ending … but one step at a time.

Many of you will know the basic outline, and indeed may have read a previous posting or two on LeafSalon about his Booker win, wild life and general craziness. But briefly, Vernon Gregory Little (the God bit becomes clear close to the end – of the book, and his life) is an already pretty jaded teenager in Martirio, a small town in Texas, when he is made the town’s scapegoat for sixteen murdered classmates. His only friend was the poor, screwed-up schoolboy killer, who also shot himself. His sad, shrill, but strangely endearing mother falls for the evil Eulalio Ledesma, (such great names) the self-styled host of the first Death Row Big Brother style reality TV show who has Vernon in mind for his big break. Mom and her friends are more interested in almond side-by-side fridges and non-stop top-ups from the Bar-B-Chew Barn than finding out what really happened that day. Vernon is destined to be shafted from all angles, relentlessly and with committed venom, and has a gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

DBC Pierre’s prose is somewhere between the eclectic teenage rantings of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory (remember that?) and Nabokov’s uncomfortably close-up and ruthless outing of human odours and foibles. His descriptions are nails-on-blackboard, scratch-and-sniff vivid. An obese Texan gets to her feet: ‘Gurie re-forms into limbs’; one of Vernon’s many, many underwear musings have him remembering ‘hauntings of hollows between elastic and thigh’ (I’ll spare you the aromatic descriptions) … or a receptionist who has ‘a voicebox made from bees trapped in tracing paper.’ Oh, yummy! I read many sentences and paragraphs over again, just for the word thrill …

His examinations of human relationships are scarily penetrating. Himself and his mother, or any parental relationship is all about the knives that parents sharpen and twist in their offspring’s backs all their lives; as a parent, it made me stop and think … His mother and her ‘friends’, are all relentlessly involved in one-upmanship based on subliminal mental indexes of each others’ weight gains and whiteware, and have ‘desperate tragic fears of being seen without the right accessory’ (Pierre in interview).

A reviewer on Amazon said of DBC Pierre, ‘he’s become some kind of pin-up boy for sections of the British literary establishment, as rabid anti-Americanism is very, very relevant, so it’s a fashionable piece of fiction without being a great one.’ There’s a grain of political truth in there for sure, but let’s not forget he started writing it in 1999, pre-Columbine and pre-9/11.

And it could well be that much of it may be autobiographical. He said of his own life at the height of his drug-buggered twenties in Mexico, ‘It was beyond satire. It was impossible to satirize because it was the most flippant farce, and macabre in the sense that it would have death and misery as its price for somebody…At that time, all of life seemed to live in that giddy upper centimeter of gaseous ridicule. I had a feeling that the whole culture - all of us, all of us developed English speakers - was just fiddling while Rome burned.’ Interesting, incidentally, considering the raison d’etre of the new, International Man Booker prize is to ‘celebrate English-language fiction as a major cultural force in the modern world’ …

That brings us to the ending. Sorry, but I thought it was a too-brief copout, albeit a rather savagely satisfying one: what goes around comes around and all that. I’ll say only this: it’s easy to picture what Hollywood’ll do to it. But I’ll still go to the movie.