Vernon Gregory Little can't control his bowels and he can't control his mouth. His thoughts are disgusting and, for a 15-year-old kid, typical. Across the table from a fat woman eating barbecued ribs, Vernon describes watching as the meat "flaps through her lips like a shit taken backwards." He and his mother live in semi-rural Texas, and the noise the pumpjack makes down the street sounds to him like "fuck, fuck, fuck." When his mother is sad, he thinks she looks "like a calendar kitten after a fucken tractor accident," and, at one point in the novel, when Vernon is considering whether or not he might be crazy, it occurs to him that, if he were crazy, it'd be a "bonanza" for his mother and her martyr complex: "Then her problem would be that she already spent her best whimpery moves," he thinks, "like, she'd have to shred a tit or something, just to keep up with the Unfolding Tragedy of Her Fucken Life."

The adults in Vernon's world are each in their own way tragic--if tragic can also mean pathetic, stagnant, or stupid--but a real tragedy as well, a bona fide American disaster, is at the center of this story: the gunning down of 16 students and teachers at Vernon's high school. The crime is committed by Vernon's best friend, and Vernon, who asserts his innocence from the outset, is charged with accessory to murder and seized both by authorities and by TV reporters (they buzz around him "like flies at a shit-roast"). Even his mom thinks he had a hand in the crime. (Vernon's alibi is embarrassing: He was taking a shit.) So he does what any Texas teenager feeling betrayed by the system--and his own mom--would do: He runs to Mexico.

So begins Vernon's very American first-person in-search-of-the-self adventure that is a commonplace in literature about teenage lives. The book is all surface and foreground and plot (what I've summarized so far isn't the half of it)--and then I do this, and then I do that, and then, and then, and then--but Vernon narrates his tale with devastating humor and captivating force. His voice is sad and wrathful, sharp and crazed, hateful and impossibly charming. Its pitch--ballsy, vulgar, sickened, disdainful, funny--is something like a cross between the world-loathing that drives J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and the coruscating misanthropy of Martin Amis' Money. Amis comes to mind not only because the narrators of Vernon God Little and Money have something in common, but because Pierre and Amis have something in common: They are both English (well, both Commonwealth), and they both achieve humor at the expense of American vanity and fatuousness, portraying with an outsider's fresh articulations the extent to which this country is fascinating and absurd.

The cynic in me suspects that Vernon God Little won this year's Booker Prize owing, in some measure, to an undue preoccupation with America on the part of the Booker Prize judges (there was evidence of a preoccupation with American themes elsewhere in the shortlist). I have a hard time believing Vernon God Little deserved the prize on its own merits: Two-thirds of the way into the novel, things change suddenly--as this review is now changing, suddenly--and, for no very believable reason, our narrator, Vernon, decides to stop cussing and to stop being mean and to become, bizarrely, someone completely unrecognizable: He becomes boring. It is an enormously unfortunate decision on the author's part--not only because the last third of the book is shoddy and underdeveloped and completely dull (having at first been a feverish boy-on-the-run adventure story, it rather uneasily congests into a leaden courtroom non-drama), but because it casts your attention onto the flaws of the first two-thirds of the book. It suddenly dawns on you--without the device (that is, distraction) of Vernon's frenetic, "fucken"-filled rants--how essentially shallow and improbable the whole premise is; how insightless Pierre's parodies of American life are (because insight and humor are not the same thing); and how much the characters have merely been employed to serve their function in an ultimately unconvincing plot.

More than the final failings of plot, though, the unforgivable flaw of the book is its detour of tone. Toward the end, story be damned, you just want that voice back--it's perverse, it's naive, it's embarrassing in places, but it's propulsive and, at times, weirdly poignant. (He has a foul mouth, sure, but Vernon is also shot through with sensitivities: Seeing his mom sad "ploughs [him] over, inside and out," and the ballad "Sailing" by Christopher Cross "breaks [his] fucken heart.") As an aggregate, the book fails, but looking back through it I am grabbed by the odd coexistence of disdain (the dismissive honesty of sentences like, "Folk up and down the street are standing by their screen-doors being devastated") and truthfulness: Whatever else he loses through the story, Vernon accumulates what he calls "learnings"--and one of them, ironically, is that it "doesn't matter what you do in life, you just have to wrap the thing in the right kind of words."

The novel doesn't build to anything interesting--I tell you, the end is a fucken shame--and there is no epiphany waiting in the final chapters. (There's redemption, but it's too contrived to be taken seriously, and too rushed and underdeveloped to be taken as viable satire.) You realize, at its conclusion, that the book is not about crime or punishment or the whims of justice, and it is not about a criminal. It is about more ordinary forms of human grossness. As if by accident, though, the author has already given all this away: 100 pages earlier, in a moment of introspection and bafflement, Vernon realizes the extent of the ugliness around him. "A learning grows in me like a tumor," he explains. "It's about the way different needy people find the quickest route to get some attention in their miserable fucken lives. The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition, Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker."

DBC Pierre reads at Elliott Bay Book Company (101 S Main St, 624-6600) at 4 pm on Sat Nov 1.