Writer Wrong

By Lev Grossman

You don't have to dig too deep to find the link between writing novels and conning people out of lots of money: both involve making stuff up. So it wasn't completely shocking when D.B.C. Pierre, the author of Vernon God Little (Canongate; 277 pages), which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize two weeks ago, rather dramatically announced that he wasn't D.B.C. Pierre at all. Turns out he's really Peter Finlay, 42, an Australian who earlier in life ran up enormous debts and bilked a close friend out of an apartment to feed his runaway drug and gambling habits (from which Pierre, as we might as well call him, is thankfully now recovering).

The British press is playing his win as a redemption story. But does the book really make up for the long rap sheet? Vernon God Little is a black comedy about a luckless teenage loser living in Martirio, billed as the Barbecue Sauce Capital of Texas. Little's friend Jesus Navarro has just committed a horrendous Columbine-style massacre at their high school, and Little, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, gets charged as an accessory. Little's desperate attempts to exonerate himself only wind up exposing the venal hypocrisies of the people around him: his mom is obsessed with fancy appliances, an opportunistic TV reporter is obsessed with his career, young women are obsessed with getting rich (except for the ones who have hearts of gold, of course). All dialogue in Vernon God Little is rendered in strenuously lifelike Texan diction ("Six packa Coors, I'll go git it") larded with hick malapropisms--you know you're not supposed to like Little's mom because she calls Ricardo Montalban "Ricardo Moltenbomb." Pierre has a field day with the alienated apercus.

Is this really the blackened, barbecued soul of America exposed? A brand new confederacy of dunces unearthed? Americans make temptingly large targets for satire these days--what with the chronic obesity and all--but I'll be double-dog-darned if we're quite this easy to skewer. Pierre may have come clean about his past, but Vernon God Little feels like just another con. --By Lev Grossman