DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little is one of my favourite books. I don’t think debut novels get much better than this, and racking my brains for the past couple of minutes I’ve only been able to come up with Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And look at what followed them (in terms of success, anyway). I don’t understand how an author like Pierre can crash onto the literary landscape seemingly fully formed in his genius, and then flounder around paddling on the beach when he should be riding on the crest of a superstardom wave. Vernon God Little is such a perfectly written novel, full of real laugh-out-loud moments, brilliantly-drawn characters, staggering metaphors, and a zeitgeist-pummeling plot, that you’d think Pierre would just be able to reel off another great story every couple of years for life. I don’t know what happened to him. His second book, Ludmila’s Broken English, began well but quickly became an incoherent mess, gorging itself on nonsensical metaphors and pointless flowery language until it threw up everywhere and left the reader to pick through the garbled story that remained. It was literally full of metaphors that made absolutely no sense, and left you completely clueless as to what Pierre wanted you to be thinking about when you read them.
Still, for me Pierre had enough credit in the bank to mean that I was really excited about reading his latest, Lights Out in Wonderland, but although it’s better than Ludmila, it still comes nowhere near the heights of Vernon. Wonderland is full of ideas and there are a few good set-pieces, but I get the impression that what Pierre really wanted to write was a short non-fiction sociology book, but because of his reputation was forced into creating something different, and once again it’s packed with words and imagery that just don’t fit together.
It must be a funny thing, to achieve so much instant success in an industry where traditionally it takes years of honing your craft to make an impact. As I mentioned earlier, Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are two of my favourite novels, and widely regarded as two of the best of the twentieth century, yet neither Ken Kesey nor Joseph Heller could replicate their initial success. How could they fail after such phenomenal debuts? To be fair, Kesey’s follow-up Sometimes A Great Notion is just as good as his debut but a lot more difficult, and he disappeared into thirty years of acid trips after that, but what happened to Heller, author of the funniest book I’ve ever read? His other novels must be really bad; I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention them, and I don’t want to tarnish his great name (in my head) by picking one up myself.
Now it looks as if DBC might join this illustrious group. What is causing Pierre to be so mediocre, when with Vernon he wrote such a brilliant satire? I can’t work out if he’s more like a musician than a writer, and spent his life collecting up all his best sentences, greatest ideas, flung them all together in one masterpiece, and now when it’s come to the second album he has to start from scratch and can’t manage it. Or if he’s so bent on replicating the success of his first novel that he’s too scared to try something new, to write outside of his proven formula, and so what’s come since is just a watered-down version of his initial greatness. It’s clear that the talent is still there, and I’ll still look forward to reading his next book, but right now my enthusiasm for his work is sliding down a slippery slope, and I’m wondering more and more if Pierre can escape his one-hit-wonder status. Just like when I spent years waiting for Crazy Frog to fulfil the promise of his debut single. He never did, and now he’s drunk, destitute, and giving croak-jobs for coppers on the seedy side of the pond.
