I avoided reading this book for a long time because it has as it’s starting point an American high school shooting and, as someone who saw Bowling For Columbine when it came out, and could never be arsed reading We Need To Talk About Kevin, I didn’t really feel like reading anything else about school shootings.
Anyway, in retrospect that was a mistake because Vernon God Little isn’t so much about the shooting itself (which has already happened before the story starts) so much as the fallout from it on the community, and on the shooters best friend - Vernon G. Little.
In tone the novel has a lot in common with JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye as well as having some of the absurdism of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces. Vernon is an engaging, likeable, if foul mouthed anti-hero and Pierre is highly skilled at having his artless narrater reveal just enough, but not too much. As a satire on the US that was published in 2003, it has aged depressingly well, with things the novel predicted sadly now seeming far more possible than they did in 2003.
A powerful and increasingly timely read.
