I recently finished reading Vernon God Little and overall I really enjoyed it. Apparently it won the Man Booker prize and I’m not going to argue with that. But there is one particular aspect of it that stuck in my craw, and I’m going to try to dig it out here.
The book is a satire, which to me means any reading of it has to make allowances for certain exaggerations and grotesqueries which, on examination, are not realistic. I am a big fan of exaggerations. At certain points, especially towards the end, I’d argue that Vernon God Little verges into being a fable, and I think that encompasses even more suspension-of-disbelief. I’m just laying all of those cards on the table to emphasize that when something in the book strikes me as not realistic, I mean above and beyond every other intentionally distorted aspect of the book.
I’ll try to give a thumbnail summary of the book for context: the title character (whose middle name is not really God) is the best/only friend of another kid who went on a shooting spree at school and then turned the gun on himself. The small-town Texas community is grieving and in shock and has no one to take these feelings out on thanks to the perpetrator’s suicide, so they end up turning on Vernon, who tries and fails to exonerate himself, then runs away to Mexico, then gets caught and brought back and put on trial, sentenced to death, but (SPOILERS!) finally is exonerated by others, gets pardoned, and gets his revenge on some of the people who wronged him along the way. Vernon’s misadventures in town, in Mexico, in the courtroom and in prison are mainly there to keep the plot bouncing farcically along. But as every good English major learns (and even I managed to pick up) books are never about the plot, they’re really about society. In the case of Vernon God Little, it’s about the media and the justice system and how people generally regard the two and in some cases can’t really tell the two apart and neither one of them ever does much in the service of the actual concept of justice.
So if I were actually writing this up as a five-page paper for Contemporary American Lit I’d have to start running through examples (and decide whether to look at them in the order they’re described in the book or in order of importance and oh dear Lord just thinking about it has me flashing back to early 90’s DOS word processing programs with blue screens and white text and menus running off the Function keys) BUT lucky for you I am just going to look at one example. Because, as I believe I mentioned, it is stuck in my craw.
There’s a hinge point in the book where Vernon is on the bubble in the court of public opinion, maybe some people think he must have had something to do with the school shootings, maybe some people think he’s being unfairly persecuted. Then a shady, self-promoting bush-league journalist cons his way into Vernon’s house by buttering up Vernon’s mom, videotapes a bunch of footage, spins it so that it all makes Vernon out to be an antisocial psychopath, and gives the whole report to the news media. Overnight Vernon is made into a monster.
I get what DBC Pierre is doing there. Society always means adult society; adults usually see teenagers as near-monsters anyway and can be easily convinced to drop the “near-“; all teenagers are rebellious, which comes across as antisocial, so finding evidence to prove they’re dangerously antisocial isn’t hard. Some teenagers like slasher flicks and actually root for the bad guy and enjoy every bloody demise onscreen, but that doesn’t mean that all of them have a deep desire to go out with a machete and hack up the residents of a sorority house, and they’re sublimating it through watching the movie. Still, if one teenager were to kill a college student, and the police (or a shady reporter) found a copy of Sorority House Massacre in his effects, a lot of people would cluck and tut and see a distinct pattern. Everyone is guilty sometimes of oversimplification, of looking for a simple explanation where things are almost always more complex and sometimes flat-out unexplainable. It’s a little ridiculous, though, and we should be better than that, and satire exists to point out the ridiculous and raise our awareness of it along with the likelihood that maybe we can change for the better.
(I worked on the campus satire magazine in college. I have pretty well convinced myself of the noble necessity of laughing at things that are awful. You may think that it sounds like a lot of self-important and naïve pigcrap. We can agree to disagree.)
Right, so, basic premise is good, and some exaggeration is to be expected. What exactly does the reporter find in Vernon’s room? Horror movie posters? Heavy metal albums? Drug paraphernalia? All good guesses, but in the end, it’s porn. Which makes sense in the larger context of the book because a lot of it is about sex and sexuality, especially the ending. But the reporter finds two kinds of porn. One is a collection of fetish pictures on Vernon’s computer, featuring naked amputees. Actually, Vernon isn’t into that sort of thing and only has those pictures because he knows he can print them out and bring them to a local guy who is totally into that sort of thing. The guy is too old to know how to surf the web and too poor to afford a computer or an internet connection anyway, but he can afford beer, and he trades kids like Vernon beer for printed out fetish porn. I found that whole arrangement pretty funny, just another clever satirical grotesquerie.
The other “porn” is one of Vernon’s mother’s lingerie catalogs. A few pages of which are stuck together. Here is my quibble: COME ON. Is Vernon’s embarrassment at having evidence of the liberties he’s taken with photos of underwear models understandable? Of course. Is the contrast between Vernon feeling no shame at collecting hardcore amputee shots for some crazy old man, and his feeling deep shame that he’s personally had a go at mom’s intimate apparel circular, a neat effect? Totally. My real quibble is the fact that the reporter makes such a big deal out of the catalog – as if the amputee porn isn’t enough! – and that the public totally buys into that.
I know that America, collectively, has a large pole up its butt about sexuality. We can certainly stand to loosen up about sex. We deserve to be ridiculed and satirized for being puritanical. But really, honestly, is there anyone in America today (and that’s when Vernon God Little is set, not in the hyper-repressed Leave It To Beaver 50’s, but today) who thinks that teenage boys who masturbate are perverts? I totally buy that in the great divide between Liberal Elitist Coastals and God-Fearing Humble Flyovers there exist mindsets and frames of reference in which a person who enjoys looking at amputee porn-with-a-capital-P is a pervert-with-a-capital-P and so sick and twisted that murder would not be outside their potential scope of interests, QED MFer. What I don’t buy is that anyone, anywhere now would think it was an obvious and self-evident conclusion to say, “He jerked off to a Victoria’s Secret catalog? What a sicko! He probably helped kill those kids, too.” That’s not an exaggeration of how uptight Americans are about sex, it’s not a caricature, it’s just absurd. It stretches the truth so far that, for me, it snaps apart to the point where I can’t resolve the incongruity.
But – am I wrong? Am I such a Liberal Elitist Coastal Douchebag that I’m just unaware these people exist? I thought we – all of us, America, the West, society - had at least gotten as far as “kids playing with themselves is normal”. Maybe there’s some healthy debate about whether or not it’s all right to talk about it in public, or in public school health classes, and whether or not encouraging it will actually speed children along to orgies of debauchery and spiritual ruin, but as far as fundamental facts (it happens, it’s not perverse) I thought we were all on the same page. Am I wrong? I think Pierre reached a little too far trying to prove a point about how uptight and judgmental society can be and invented a false mindset that doesn’t exist anymore (if it ever did), but maybe it’s just a slight distortion of a worldview that very much prevails. I don’t know.
In any case, whatever the answer, it just makes me want to go to Texas less and less.
No comments:
Post a Comment