Furriners go nuts for gun-totin' Yanks!

As DBC Pierre's phony-baloney novel and Gus Van Sant's empty "Elephant" make clear, there's one sure way to snag a glittery European prize: Shoot up the high school.

By Laura Miller

Nov 6, 2003 | Two words for any artist, American or not, who wants to snag a prestigious award from foreigners: school shootings. Gus Van Sant's turgid Columbine-inspired "Elephant" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May, and last month first-time novelist DBC Pierre received the Man Booker Prize, England's most prestigious literary honor, for "Vernon God Little," the story of a 15-year-old Texas boy falsely accused of complicity in a massacre at his high school. That second event had American book editors (who had unanimously passed on the manuscript, which was published by the small Scottish house Canongate Books) and book review editors (who had decided to give the novel minor coverage at most) scrambling to account for their supposed lapse in judgment. Even Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine that runs reviews of forthcoming books -- and a notoriously soft touch -- dismissed "Vernon God Little" as "tiresome" and "unlikeable."

Some might enjoy what they imagine to be the spectacle of the literary establishment eating crow, but this was one case in which the system worked. "Vernon God Little" shows some promise, but it is not a good book. More important even than that, it's not a plausible book. One of the Man Booker judges, John Corey, describes the novel as "a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America." However well Pierre's work might reflect the "alarm and fascination" of Corey and his colleagues, what it doesn't reflect with any authority is America itself. It's a synthetic concoction of artificial flavors and colors, about as authentic a representation of American life as cherry soda is of the fresh fruit.

Admittedly, protesting the portrait of America in "Vernon God Little" is like objecting when an outsider mocks a family member for flaws we've criticized ourselves. "Vernon God Little" depicts its American characters either as fat, media-struck sheep obsessed with cheap sentiment and the acquisition of large durable goods or as ruthless, hypocritical hustlers. Americans have also been known to lament the physical unfitness, venality and gullibility of our fellow citizens. It's true that there are too many guns out there and we're too quick to use them.

It's also true that some of the homegrown complaints about these issues aren't much more sophisticated than the cartoonish spitballs lobbed by Pierre. But at least they come from inside the culture, from people who have no choice but to wrestle with them every day of our lives because we live here. We send our kids to schools like Columbine, and we've gone to them ourselves. If school shootings arise from some particularly dark vein in American culture, only someone who actually understands America can trace it to its source.

DBC Pierre was born as Peter Finlay in Australia to British parents and was raised in Mexico, where he spent his adolescence; he now lives in Ireland. He's had a colorful life full of misadventures and substance abuse, which makes him catnip for profile writers. He's said to have spent some time in Texas, though apparently it didn't take. The British press has praised "Vernon God Little" for the skill with which Pierre reproduces an American voice. Right. About as spot-on as Dick Van Dyke's Cockney accent in the movie "Mary Poppins," old chap.

America is full of writers who don't have much to say for themselves, who can't tell a story or make an interesting point, but who nevertheless know how to sound like Americans. Sometimes, that's almost enough to carry them, those loping, rangy, mulishly prosaic cadences of American speech, first (and perhaps best) captured by Mark Twain. The American voice -- sort of Southern, sort of Western, a hybrid that, without being either one, manages to suggest both -- makes an ideal vehicle for both bald-faced overstatement and the insistent needling of pomposity and cant.

DBC Pierre isn't really capable of re-creating this voice. To make matters worse, he attempts a kind of Texan variation on the cranky teenage diction of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, possibly the single most distinctive and imitated voice in American fiction. "The Catcher in the Rye" is a sustained tour de force, perfectly pitched and controlled, for all that Holden himself flails around in that quintessentially teenage mix of false bluster, moral indignation and bruised sentiment. Nothing misleads inexperienced writers so grievously as a style that feels casual and improvised; they assume it's produced in the same spirit. In fact, to be convincing this kind of writing has to be exquisitely calibrated and polished with great discipline. Making it look easy is the hardest thing.

Next Page: Are we in Texas or the Alps or Joyce's Ireland? What American teenager says "motorcoaches"?

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