'Huck Finn' meets 'South Park' in 'Vernon God Little'

If literary awards are a barometer for how the world views America, the outcome of this year's controversial Man Booker Prize ceremony might predict a cold snap in our diplomatic relationships with England.

After several years of awarding heavyweights like Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee and Margaret Atwood, this year's prize went to an unknown named DBC Pierre — actually the nom de plume of Paul Finlay, an Australian-Mexican man — for his first novel, "Vernon God Little" (Canongate, $23). Judging chair professor John Carey praised the book as "a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America."

Carey was putting things mildly. "Vernon God Little" might be the most vicious satire of American life to come out of the UK since Martin Amis' 1985 "Money." Set in a small Texas town at the center of a media circus, the book places an astute, if needling finger on the scary collusion between entertainment and law enforcement in American culture.

The boy at the center of this whirlwind is Vernon Little, a foul-mouthed 15-year-old with precocious powers of observation. As the tale opens, Vernon has been hauled into the police station in his hometown of Martirio, Texas. His best friend, Jesus, brought a rifle to school and took down nearly 20 of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. Vernon, the police believe, must have been an accomplice.

Before the interview is over, however, Vernon sneaks out of jail with his aunt, beginning this novel's addictively weird series of escapes and captures. Over the novel's 277 pages, Pierre takes us on a picaresque journey from Martirio to San Antonio to Houston, all the way down to Acapulco. If "Huckleberry Finn" were set on the border and written by the creators of "South Park," it might read something like this.

Like Matt Stone and Trey Parker's fictional Colorado town, Martirio is painted with cartoonish stereotypes and scatological broad strokes. Nearly every denizen is overweight to the point of obesity; they just cannot keep their hands off Vernon's mother's joy cakes. As Vernon describes it, "this is a neighborhood where underwear sags low." It's hard to blame Vernon for wanting to leave.

Although the sheer forward momentum of this trip compels a reader to keep turning the pages, it is Vernon Little who makes it hard to get off this crazy thing. Brash, cynical and yet vulnerable, he is horribly neglected by his family, who are so wrapped up in the media coverage of Vernon's trial that they forget to protect him.

In the process of ranting about his town and family, Vernon impressively mangles language into his own crude idiom. He complains about becoming a "skate-goat" for a crime he did not commit and worries that the "paradime" shift that a sketchy TV producer promises him will actually put him behind bars.

Even funnier, however, are the metaphors Vernon uses. One man has a "face swept back by the velocity of his talking," while a mean comment makes Vernon's mother look "like a calendar kitten after a tractor accident." Given Vernon's obsession with bowel movements — let's just say he has a condition — there are dozens of metaphors that begin and end with, well, the rump.

Still, in spite of its linguistic daring-do, "Vernon God Little" is less a satire than it is a burlesque. It ignores the emotional strafing such high-school massacres leave in their wake in order to make a point about the way media — and Americans' susceptibility to it — warp the moral contract. Even Vernon, who actually has "waves" of sympathy for his dead classmates, gets carried away by his outlaw status.

What grates even more about "Vernon God Little" is that in order to make these points it twists itself into a pretzel of unbelievable plotting and gross generalization. Not one character in these pages, including, eventually, Vernon God Little, earns our sympathy. They are uniformly cruel and crass to one another. The redemption they achieve is ironic, a poke in the eye. Writers are entitled to their bleakness, and satire demands license. But when books go so far over the top, their insights become easy to dismiss. Ultimately, the acclaim "Vernon Little God" received abroad is at least as interesting the novel, showing us that learned Brits are happy to see America reflected in a fun-house mirror.

John Freeman is a writer in New York.