This Week's Reads

VERNON GOD LITTLE

By D.B.C. Pierre (Canongate, $23)

The one thing everybody seems to know about this startling, dark-horse Man Booker Prize-winning novelthat it's about Columbineis not true. Even though its pell-mell action is triggered by a school shooting in an imaginary Central Texas town, it has absolutely nothing to say about the causes of such tragedies. The gunning down of students by classmate Jesus Navarro is barely described, just a gimmick to get events in motionand Jesus' best friend, Vernon Little, on the run.

The novel's subsequent tone, pace, and underlying nihilism are like the endless murder of Kenny on South Park. The book is an obscene cartoon, yet it's an obscenely readable cartoon, full of deep emotion. It's a coded version of the author's real, stranger-than-fiction life on the run; he (real name Peter Finlay) was a cokehead junkie jailbird who stole from friends and dined from Dumpsters. None of this is in the book, but the guilt is, plus an audacious tale-spinning gift and headlong energy.

Vern, the 15-year-old narrator, is falsely implicated in the school shootingthe "skategoat," in his own eloquently scrambled patois. Like a hunted man in a Hitchcock flick, Vern doesn't feel innocent, not with the whole world after him and circumstantial evidence conspiring to stamp GUILTY on his face. When a predatory TV newsman finds two joints on Vern, the scene is informed by the author's pre-rehab youth. And when Vern refers to "my slime" (his dirty secrets), it feels autobiographical. Vern tends to defecate unpredictably, and a crucial piece of evidence in the case is a turd Vern left at the crime scene: a metaphor for Finlay's stinky past.

Much of the novel is derivative. Vern channels Holden Caulfield, Ignatius J. Reilly, Tyrone Slothrop, and Irvine Welsh's Filth. Events are arbitrary, set in locales less vivid than the pyrotechnic inside of Vern's own head. The characters are cartoonish lampoons, and Vern's flight and fight for life are curiously static. The satire of America at its worstrootin' tootin' Texas trash culture, amoral, greedy, tasteless, media-crazed, heartless, brainless, ruled by violent authorities out to ruthlessly crush any American who dares to be unluckyshould be a cruel cartoon, but Bush and Ashcroft are working to make it the national reality. One suspects the Booker jurors meant the prize partly as an indictment of Dubya.

What redeems slimebag Vern and justifies the jurors' choice is his exquisite gift of slangy gab. His sentences dance with jolting verbal music; his metaphors are as daring as Finlay's scams, only he pulls them off. An evil Texas cop's "chins recoil like snails shot with vinegar." Courted by the TV newsman, Vern's mom's eyelashes "flutter like dying flies," her face in disappointment is "like a calendar kitten after a tractor accident." And don't even get me started on the naughty parts of the book (including the denizens of the plot-turning Web site Bambi-Boy Butt Bazaar, also known as Serenade of Sodom). In life, D.B.C. Pierre may be a reformed pseudonymous fraud, but in literature, Finlay is the real thing. TIM APPELO

D.B.C. Pierre will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 4 p.m. Sat., Nov. 1.

By Dan Rhodes (Canongate, $23)

It's not easy being one of Granta's anointed Best Young Brits, especially when Dan Rhodes' publishing-house stablemate, D.B.C. Pierre (see above), has so suddenly eclipsed him. I suspect Rhodes' reputation will survive, although it won't be on the basis of this short, bifurcated debut novel of exile and return. The first half concerns the happy Umbrian household occupied by aging English ex-pat composer Richard Cockroft and his adopted stray dog, Timoleon Vieta. This is the portion that ran in Granta"When he lived alone, he used toenail clippings and pubic hairs as bookmarks," Rhodes writes of this dotty, alcoholic, unloved hermitand the reason I wanted to read the book.

Then there's the second half, after Cockroft is induced by a Bosnian interloperwho services him sexuallyto dump his beloved mutt in distant Rome. (It's a love triangle, you see, between dog, dog owner, and rent boy.) Timoleon Vieta embarks upon a homeward odyssey modeled on Eric Knight's 1938 Lassie Come-Home, intersecting with the lives of various people during the journey. In Lassie, these episodes were uplifting and heartwarming, only here nobody benefits from the pooch's presence. The uplift is ephemeral, and Rhodes makes you a sucker for expecting a cheerful reunion at the story's end.

Why bother reworking such a naive, outdated form of fiction? Why create charactersboth human and caninewith the intent of destroying the reader's investment in them? Rhodes can write well enough, but he fails to justify or integrate this oddly compound story. Part one is a novella; part two is a series of short stories linked by the dog and concluded with a narrative act of rug pulling. It adds up to three aspects out of balance, as if Rhodes can't decide which attitude to support with his talents: sincere, snide, or superior. BRIAN MILLER

Dan Rhodes is scheduled to appear at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), Sat., Nov. 1; call to confirm time.