Abstract
The early reception of D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003) has been characterized by comparisons with two canonical literary antecedents: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1991/1951) and, at a greater remove, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The three novels capitalize on the subversive potential of disaffected teenage narrators, whose compelling vernacular voices, and distinctive position as outsiders in the adult world, are powerful tools for social critique. This article offers an analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in the narrative tradition that links Vernon Little to Huckleberry Finn via the pivotal figure of Holden Caulfield, who is widely considered as the original, unsurpassed model of adolescent rebelliousness in modern literature. Grounded in an extensive exploration of the history of reception of the three texts, this study proceeds to highlight and explore the wider implications of Pierre’s provocative twist on his predecessors’ narrative template. Significantly, this deliberate departure is overlooked in most reviews of Vernon God Little—an omission which testifies to our deep investment in the idea of teenagers as liminal figures between childhood and adulthood, and thus still relatively untainted by worldly corruption. Paradoxically, the persistence of this romanticized view of adolescence coexists with much less idealized representations of young people, especially in the media. This particular contradiction is tentatively teased out in a brief coda to the main argument, with reference to another idiosyncratic adolescent narrator who has managed to capture the popular imagination in recent years: Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003). Although his connection with Salinger’s text is less immediately obvious than Vernon’s, in some ways Christopher is a more legitimate heir to Holden Caulfield than Pierre’s protagonist.
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Notes
Pierre’s real name is Peter Findlay, and the initials in his pseudonym stand for “Dirty But Clean.” Joyce Carol Oates refers to him as the “dark horse” in the 2003 race for the Booker, while Sarah Fay McCarthy’s 2004 review of Vernon opens with a description of a “dumbstruck” (p. 183) Pierre’s failure to stand up to accept the award when his victory was first announced.
George Steiner first referred to the “Salinger Industry” in 1959 to gesture to the high volume of critical studies generated on the author’s relatively small body of work, in the wake of the popularity of Catcher. As Sarah Graham (2007, p. 48) points out, this scholarly momentum had gathered in less than a decade since the publication of Catcher.
The expression is a translation of Sturm und Drang, the name of the late 18th-century German Romantic movement which gave us, in the protagonist of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a blueprint for the sensitive, tormented and fiercely non-conformist young man.
Heiserman and Miller identify both Huck Finn and the narrative tradition of the quest (typically found in epic journeys and their modern counterparts) as Holden’s literary antecedents.
Salinger was drafted in 1942 and saw combat as an infantryman in various major European campaigns, including the D-Day landings. There is no doubt that the war had a huge impact on his life and on his writing.
This is true both at school and in universities, and in less formal exchanges of advice about “must read” books, as Menand acknowledges in this unashamedly anecdotal passage: “People generally read The Catcher in the Rye when they are around 14 years old, usually because the book was given or assigned to them by people—parents or teachers—who read it when they were fourteen years old, because somebody gave or assigned it to them. The book keeps acquiring readers, in other words, not because kids keep discovering it but because grownups who read it when they were kids keep getting kids to read it. This seems crucial to making sense of its popularity. The Catcher in the Rye is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become … a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.”
See, for example, the entry on “Teenage Fiction” in the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, where Julia Eccleshare (2004, p. 543) identifies Catcher alongside William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) as the “two most recent precursors of the teenage novel.” The latter text “shatters any illusions about childhood innocence” and therefore “appeals powerfully to readers who have begun to recognize this loss in themselves.” Catcher “has made an even greater impact, because the stream of consciousness, first person narrative of Holden Caulfield, with its detached and critical view of the adult world, is not only in itself liberating but has also been imitated in many subsequent novels” (2004, p. 543). See also Jonathan Stephens’s 2007 attempt to define the category of Young Adult Fiction in The ALAN Review.
These counter-proposals—one of which is Vernon God Little—can all “readily be subsumed under the genre category of ‘boyhood narratives’,” though, according to the author, they are “equally suitable for mixed-gender classrooms” (Nieragden, 2010, p. 568).
In Louisa May Alcott’s often cited, possibly apocryphal, comment: “If Mr Clemens [Mark Twain’s real name] cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them” (quoted in Trites, 2007, p. 3). Alcott was close to the committee who banned Huckleberry Finn from the Concord Public Library in 1885, a decision which, according to Twain, doubled the sales of the book.
John Mullan (2006) shrewdly comments that one “could not be sure that this is exactly a bookish reference: maybe our TV-obsessed hero once caught some half-baked dramatization [of Huckleberry Finn].”
The occurrences of “ole” in Vernon are too frequent to mention, but for variations on “it slays me” see pp. 48, 66, 147, 159, 193. Other recurrent speech habits shared by the two adolescent characters are “like hell” and “and all”; see also Costello (1959) for an insightful analysis of Holden’s pattern of speech.
Like other sexual predators in the novel, Mr. Deutschman is portrayed as a man taking advantage of his powerful, influential position: “He used to be a school principal or something, all righteous and upstanding, back in the days before they’d bust you for that type of thing [i.e., sexual abuse]” (Pierre, 2003, p. 38).
For good measure, Pierre is careful to show how Jesus’s intended victims are horrible bullies—but the main reason why he gets away with using a high-school massacre as a pretext for comic writing is his caricatural, over-the-top treatment of his subject, which desensitizes readers to its extreme violence and squalor.
A recurrent refrain since its first mention at the beginning of the narrative— “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead” (Twain, 1999/1884, p. 16—see also pp. 37, 51, 53, 228, 229)—Huck’s acute “streak of loneliness” is reprised by Holden, in remarkably similar terms: “I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead” (Salinger, 1991/1951, p. 48—see also p. 81, 90, 153 and 155).
Readers are prepared to witness a cruel and summary execution of “justice” already at the end of Chapter 1: “all I whiff, over the sweat and barbecue sauce, is school—the kind of pulse bullyboys give off when they spot a quiet one, a wordsmith, in a corner. The scent of lumber being cut for a fucken cross” (Pierre, 2003, p. 11).
Pierre knows that “eventually the thing that people like is to see justice being done,” though, as John Mullan retorts in the same interview, justice is “dished out” by Pierre and received by the readership in the same cheering spirit in which we respond to the demise of a “villain in a James Bond movie” (Guardian Book Club, 2006).
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Dr Keith Carabine and Dr Sally Minogue for their generous, perceptive comments on early drafts of this article.
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Stefania Ciocia is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. She is the author of Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling (Liverpool University Press, 2012), and of several articles and book chapters on 20th- and 21st-century fiction. Her research interests include American literature, crime writing, and representations of children and adolescents in contemporary culture.
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Ciocia, S. “The World Loves an Underdog,” or the Continuing Appeal of the Adolescent Rebel Narrative: A Comparative Reading of Vernon God Little, The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn . Child Lit Educ 49, 196–215 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9287-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9287-1