A wickedly astute view of the horror of adolescence

Conangate, 279 pp., $23

When school shootings happen, people want to know why, but who would expect to get the answer from a comedy? It's hard to imagine wringing the darkest humor from that subject, and even satire would seem difficult. Enter Vernon Gregory Little, the 15-year-old narrator and antihero of DBC Pierre's first novel, who likes to play games with his middle initial: Vernon Genius Little, or Vernon Godzilla Little, or, for the title, Vernon God Little. Vernon has a gift for wordplay that would keep the shade of James Joyce amused, and the strongest motives for his fast, desperate talk, because he's wrongly accused in a schoolyard slaughter in Martirio, Texas, which has left all other witnesses and the real shooter dead.

Vernon's view of his surroundings is withering: ''I don't know about your town, but around here we decorate our pumpjacks. Even have competitions for them. Our pumpjack is fixed up like a mantis, with a head and legs stuck on. This giant mantis just pump, pump, pumps away at the dirt next door. The local ladies decorated it... [Expletive] goes the mantis, like it does every four seconds of my life.'' The people of Martirio are caught in the same ruthless gaze: ''Mom's best friend is called Palmyra. Everybody calls her Pam. She's fatter than Mom, so Mom feels good around her. Mom's other friends are slimmer. They're not her best friends.'' And Pierre gives Vernon a devastatingly accurate ear for dialogue:

'''I think Vaine bought ribs,' says Eileena.

'' 'Vaine Gurie? She's supposed to be on the Pritikin diet - Barry'll have a truck!'

'' 'Good-night, she damn near livesat the Bar-B-Chew Barn!' ''

Vernon's wicked eye and still more wicked tongue crank the banalities of small-town Southern life into a corkscrew of the grotesque. Socially impaired by, among other things, an incontinence problem (an inopportune defecation during the shooting leaves evidence that might finally exonerate him), Vernon is the sort of teenager who experiences adolescence as a horror movie even before the real horrors begin. So is the real shooter, Jesus Navarro, who's just about Vernon's only friend: ''I sting for him sometimes, with his retreaded, second-hand Jordan New Jacks, and his goddam alternative lifestyle, if that's what you call this new fruity thing. His character used to fit him so clean, like a sports sock, back when we were kings of the universe, when the dirt on a sneaker mattered more than the sneaker itself. We razed the wilds outside town with his dad's gun, terrorized ole beer cans, watermelons, and trash. It's like we were men before we were boys, back before we were whatever the [expletive] we are now.''

When the horror movie gets real, it also gets on TV, largely thanks to Eulalio Ledesma, a deadbeat TV repairman masquerading as a journalist who shows up on Vernon's doorstep with a camcorder the moment Vernon becomes a suspect. Before long Ledesma has managed to seduce Vernon's mother, frame Vernon for an absurdly long string of crimes, and turn all his family and acquaintances into reality-TV performers in a courtroom drama of which Vernon is the very reluctant star. Here the novel veers into the broadest satire, as Vernon, now wrongly convicted of the schoolyard slayings, finishes his teenage years on death row - but it's satire with teeth and a deep bite. Ledesma, whose exploitation of Vernon's story has turned him into a media emperor, explains: '' 'We're not just talking executions here - we're talking the ultimate reality TV, where the public can monitor, via cable or Internet, prisoners' whole lives on death row.' ''

Remarkably, the novel (recently awarded the Man Booker Prize) can successfully blend this sort of hyperbolic lampoon with as many moments of deep authenticity. The marvelously agile and flexible language Pierre puts in Vernon's mouth makes it happen. The juvenile nastiness of Vernon's speech is one of the truest things about it, but his voice is also capable of poetry, extended metaphor, even metaphysical conceit. ''I'll tell you a learning: knife-turners like my ole lady actually spend their waking hours connecting [expletive] into a humongous web, just like spiders. It's true. They take every word in the... universe, and index it back to your knife. In the end it doesn't matter what words you say, you feel it on your blade. Like, 'Wow, see that car?' 'Well, it's the same blue as that jacket you threw up on at the Christmas show, remember?' '' Throughout the book this image keeps evolving: ''I learned that the authorized world doesn't recognize the knife. Your knife is invisible, that's what makes it so convenient to use. See how things work? It's what drives folks to the blackest crimes, and to sickness, I know it; the thing of everyone turning the knife just by saying hello, or something equally innocent-sounding.'' At the end, the image embraces Jesus in the hour before his crime: ''Class is a pizza oven this Tuesday morning, all the usual smells baked into an aftertaste of saliva on metal. Rays of light impale selected slimeballs at their desks. Jesus is locked in his school attitude, lit by the biggest ray. He stares at his desk, baring his back, exposing his knife. You probably have a knife stuck in you that loved-ones can twist on a whim. You should take care nobody else discovers where it's stuck.''

There's a lot of bitterness in this wit, but it makes for a plausible explanation of why such catastrophes do happen. Particular circumstances don't matter. It doesn't matter what's indexed to the knife, only that the knife is there, planted in the greatest misfits among our children, and sometimes it cuts a little too deep.

Madison Smartt Bell's most recent book is the novel "Anything Goes," published by Pantheon Books.