Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre, 2003)

I could tell that Vernon God Little was a Booker prize winner, it has that 'worthy' feel about it. The first-person narration by the 16 year old titular protagonist, accused of assisting in the massacre of 16 schoolmates in a small Texas town, felt like a sort of fusion between The Catcher in the Rye (not a good comparison, I found the book and it's lead Holden Caulfield in accessible and unsympathetic) and We Need To Talk About Kevin (which had a mystery surrounding a school shooting, and was excellent). 

The further through the book I got, the less like Catcher it felt and the more I liked it. Vernon is clearly a troubled young man, having witnessed the aftermath of the massacre at the hands of his friend Jesus, he is later accused of complicity and arrested. He flees to Mexico, stopping on the way to see the girl of his dreams who subsequently acts as a honey trap resulting in Vernon's trial and incarceration on Death Row. Wrapped around this are various grotesque characters, such as Vernon's seemingly uncaring, self-involved mother, a whole collection of people named 'Gurie' and a villain in the form of Lally, a wannabe media mogul who becomes massive off the back of the national tragedy in Martirio. 

I suppose the book is a critique on America, and especially on the way that everything now has a media spin - Vernon's trial is filmed live while he has a button he can press to recant at any moment, Death Row killings become like a Big Brother phone-vote for the public to choose who goes under the needle next. DBC Pierre paints a skewed version of reality (TV) and poor Vernon is lost amongst it. He's an angry kid, but not unsympathetically so like Caulfield before him - he learns from events, and he gets swept all with them too, falling victim to the honey trap. I really liked the way everything tied up nice and neatly at the end, and the element of mystery - did Vernon really have nothing to do with the killings? - was effective.