Vernon God Little belongs to the genre that developed post Harris and Klebold -- the school shooting novel. Only, it takes this nascent genre, kills off the hand-wringing self-examination, only glancingly talks about the shooting near the end of the book, and injects bitter humor, satire and grief in place of How Has the World Come to This?

That alone makes me enjoy the book. Because people have a tendency to, oh, I don't know, either villify or romanticize student shooters, and this book stays away from that conceit. It's much more about the prosecution and wrong-headed attempts at executing the friend of the shooter, simply because his face gets plastered across all the newspapers and all the major networks. At one point, the place of the shooting, a dead-end town called Martirio, Texas, is miffed that a school shooting in California has taken the lead in national awareness, because if the media trucks leave, where will they be? Yes, it's that type of novel, tearing apart consumer culture, chastizing the media for its ability to turn couch potatoes into lemmings, really tearing a new one into the frightening collusion of self-satisfied judgment and voyeurism we call reality TV. But if it were just a diatribe against a spitsplat, Deep South town and the media that runs rife over it, the novel would lose me quickly. This is also a road trip, an adventure both exterior and interior.

The novel is told throughout by Vernon Gregory Little, the friend of school shooter and best friend Jesus. Vernon has a hyperstylized voice. He doesn't know the true meaning or spelling of some words -- paradigm becomes "powerdime"; a teaching is a "learning" -- and he is adept at powerful insights that should be well beyond the ability of a teen-age boy whose primary mode of communication is through cussing. But, y'know what? This is a novel. His voice is a representation of teen-age angst and confused sex thoughts commingled with occasional insights into the real world, not the thing itself.

DBC (Dirty But Clean) Pierre is wonderful at capturing the failed dreams of little Martirio. He gives it a real geography. Most yards have an oil pumpjack in it, always squeaking and pumping away, and the neighborhood has taken to having yearly contests to see who can decorate theirs the best (one of them is even painted to look like a praying mantis, which is one of the many symbols Pierre sneaks into the book when you're not looking; go ahead, try to spot them all). By the end of the novel you'll know where the Bar-B-Chew Barn is, where Keeter's auto shop and its empty, dusty fields are, the relative distance from the sheriff's office to Vernon's house.

The novel opens with Vernon dressed in only his underwear and sneakers, being interviewed by policewoman Vaine Gurie, who is married to the chief and in dire need of upping her quota of prosecuted criminals or the chief is going to kick her off the force (to deflect his disgust that she can't stay on her diet for him). Because of this, she looks for ways to link Vernon to the shooting, dropping inneundo and double-meanings into the interview to try and get him to admit his guilt. He pulls his clothes back on and keeps trying to prove his innocence, but Vaine pushes him down back alleys of conversation that leave him confused and exhausted. Vernon's mother's friend, Palmyra, comes in to ask Vernon if he's eaten anything since morning, then absconds him from the interview despite his protests while Vaine is outside gathering paperwork. Pam reasons that she's known the Guries for a long time, and a boy needs his food. This will, of course, lead to disasterous consequences later on.

After stopping at the Bar-B-Chew for some grub, Pam and Vernon head back home. They are stopped by Vaine, who now says that Vernon leaving in the middle of an interview is enough to prove his guilt. A man with a video camera approaches the driveway from behind a tree, He introduces himself as Eulalio Ledesma, a reporter from CNN, and puts Vaine on the spot about her treatment of Vern. She leaves. We think we've found a friend in Lalio. How wrong we are.

The clues are there from the beginning that Lalio is lying about his situation. He sleeps outside in his van because, as he tells Vern, he "wants to give the corporate AmEx a rest." He keeps borrowing money from Vern's extremely lonely and self-pitying mother. Later on, it will turn out that he's left his blind mother in Nagodoches to fend for herself so he could drive to Martirio the moment he heard of the massacre to see how he could exploit it. He doesn't work for CNN, but CMN, a television repair place. The camera he uses for "exclusive interviews" is stolen from a friend.

He quickly burrows into the center of Vern's life. Vern's father died years back, and there is no male presence in the household. Vern's mother falls head over heels for him, and her loose aggregate of chatty friends swoon for him too. Vern trusts "Lally" (as Vern's mother calls him) until he tells Lally to share the real story of his plight with the media, and Lally paints Vern as the criminal. His mother is too happy being with someone who pays attention to her to notice the transgression.

Vern is arrested. At court, Vaine is begrudgingly forced to release Vernon into the care of a court-appointed psychologist, a Dr. Goosens. I don't want to give too much away, but lets just say that Goosens has his own ulterior motives for examining Vernon, and when Vernon resists Goosens, Goosens reminds Vernon who's in power here. It's just another case of Vernon being mishandled and abused by the adult power structure.

Vern begins dreaming of escape. Of living in Mexico at a beach house with a girl he only briefly met outside a party, named Taylor, years ago. He goes so far as to call Taylor in Houston -- impersonating a family friend to get the number -- to see if anything would ever be possible. When Vern escapes his house and runs away (by this point the town not only thinks Vernon is responsible for the school shooting, but also for the murder of a police officer thanks to Lally's maneuvering and media manipulation), he ends up calling her again. He plays up his outlaw image a little to try and win her -- she agrees to meeting him in Houston at a mall to chat. Unfortunately, soon after he meets her, he realizes with horror that a friend of his mother's, who turns out to be a cousin of Taylor's, is joining them for lunch. He runs out before he's identified.

He eventually makes it into Mexico, via bus rides, cabbing it and, when out of money, hiking to the border, and this is where we get to see Vernon be himself. Up until this point, Vernon has been nothing but prosecuted by everyone in town. Out here in Mexico, stopping into a bar and having a taste of tequila, pouring back beers, meeting someone at the bar who agrees to drive him to his little village, he gets to loosen up and stop worrying that everybody is out to screw him over. He has paranoid flashes as the little truck passes through Alcapulco, because he knows some people from Martirio are known to vacation there in the summer. He makes it through okay, befriends the man's family, and even gets the beach-house he dreamed of, a little more rundown than his fantasies, but gloriously real. He gets a phone card and calls Taylor from a payphone, seeing if she can wire over some money to him. He also calls his mother to tell her not to worry, that everything will be okay.

Soon enough, he is arrested again, and escorted back into Texas. Not to Martirio, but to Harris County, where the real trouble cases go to stand for trial. There is a new system for those on trial for murder -- they are put into a cage in the courtroom, and are allowed to press a green button if they want to speak in their defense above and beyond what their attorney is spouting. Not only is Vern given a prison trim, but doctors realize he has bad eyesight, so he is fitted with thick, horrendous glasses. A friend also sends him a crucifix in the mail, which he wears to trial. He looks, to the jury, every bit the psychopath that the media has trumpeted him as. It doesn't help that Vernon stands impassive. In one of his moments of insight, he realizes that the innocent are expected to fidget to show their innocence, but he refuses to play that game. So, for being the only one true to himself, he is also hanging himself out to dry.

I'm going to leave the rest of the novel, and lots of side trips I didn't talk about, for you to read. I will say that Lally has been busy, constructing a small media empire through the tragedy in Martirio and the exploitation of Vern, and has gone into a deal with the Texas prison system to broadcast the exploits of prisoners on Death Row. Viewers at home can watch these men and then vote, over the Internet, who should be next executed. The execution, by lethal injection, will then be televised, with the executed free to choose from a list of songs for his exit and signing a waiver agreeing not to deviate from his pre-chosen final words. The frightening thing? That doesn't seem too far-fetched.

If, at the end, you feel the book doesn't have the courage of its convictions, I ask you to reconsider. Vernon told us in the first chapter how everything was going to end. It's just he wasn't grown up enough -- nor was the town -- to face it. If you really identify with his plight, or at least with his insights, you should feel that deep wooshing warmth-cold that tells you you have just finished a great book. Vernon God Little has its flaws and its crudeness, but it's also a first novel, and it makes fewer mistakes -- and takes bigger strides -- than you'd expect.





Recommended: Yes