Book Report: Vernon God Little

At  first I found Vernon God Little to be rough going.  The narrative voice -- a popcultch-saturated south Texas adolescent idiom -- took some getting used to. The novel is a post-mass-murder burlesque, hilarious in spots, but not even remotely credible.  Vernon God Little won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, but I wonder whether the novel would be so highly regarded by English literati if it had portrayed England the way it portrays the U.S -- as a country where everyone, every single person, is either a pederast, an idiot, a con-man, a traitor, an opportunist, an incompetent, or just fat, lovelorn, vicious and vacant. The pseudonymous DBC Pierre, an Australian, seems to have acquired all his information about the United States from watching trash TV.  He's written a funny book, because caricature can be very amusing, but I hope that unwary Europeans and Asians who read Vernon God Little don't think that they've entered the heart of America, because they sure as hell haven't. Caveant lectores. I wonder also about the novel's thick impasto of Christian symbolism.  Vernon lives on Beulah Lane in a town called Martirio; he calls himself a "skategoat."  Will he die for America's vulgarities?  And are we supposed to take seriously Vernon's last-minute conversion to faith?  I couldn't -- in fact, the last-chapter Hollywood ending seemed to me mighty meretricious.