In this mode, Pierre is like a grown-up version of the titular 15-year-old hero of his novel, Vernon God Little (Faber & Faber). His linguistic felicities (he refers to one disliked playmate as an ”egg sac of a critter” and to himself as a boy of ”big ole puppy-dog features like God made me through a fucken magnifying glass”) have been compared in their venom to Eminem, in their humour to South Park and in their explosive, colloquial poetry to Rabelais.
As with Little, Pierre knows what it’s like to experience ”90 flavours of trouble riding on his ass”, having been addicted to cocaine and run up such huge debts that he ripped off a friend to the tune of £30 000. Winning the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom will not counter the lesson of Pierre’s past 20 years: that life is ”a hard bastard” and ”we should count ourselves lucky for just about everything, including drawing breath”.
In a bar in west London he muses on the weirdness of the direction his life has just taken. I ask him if he can draw it (he used to be a cartoonist) and after scribbling on a napkin, he produces ”a picture of me walking my pet turd” that he says is ”stupid and whimsical” — a little like his life.
Pierre entered the Booker race as an outsider and he was warned by his publishers that he shouldn’t expect to win. Comic novels, particularly those laden with obscenities from a smart-mouthed teen, don’t tend to impress the literary establishment. So, last week, when news of Pierre’s success reached the Faber & Faber camp, a roar went up as if a goal had been scored in the World Cup football final. ”Darling,” a Faber executive was overheard yelling into his cellphone, ”your engagment ring just got bigger.”
This has not, until now, been Pierre’s world. In fact he struggles to identify with any one environment, having been rich and poor, legit and corrupt (the first bit of his pseudonym stands for Dirty But Clean) and of no fixed nationality. Born in Australia to English parents, he was brought up in Mexico, where his father moved the family to pursue his career as a scientist. Pierre compares his accent (Australian, with occasional interference from the United States and south London) to ”an unfinished house”, a good description for his image as a whole: ramshackle on the surface, but with strong, structural potential.
”I grew up with a real sense of cultural homelessness,” he says. ”I haven’t been succesful in fitting in anywhere. I clearly wasn’t Mexican, although I could move in that culture as easily as anywhere. I’m a British national but wasn’t quite from here; and I went to school with a lot of expat Americans. As a kid it was really fucking difficult to know which crowd I belonged to. I changed accents a hell of a lot. In Mexico I’d be American, then I’d go on holiday to England and get the piss taken out of me for being a Yank. I took a very patriotic turn in my early 20s and thought since Australia is where I was born, maybe that could be the thing. It was a lovely spot, but a bloody hard place to fit into. There’s nothing I love more than to just be part of something.”
Since details of Pierre’s past came to light he has been accused of adopting another convenient persona, this time not to fit in but to stand out. But he says that the only lies he has told have been to himself, driven hard and deep to support the weight of a towering self-delusion. From a childhood lived in luxury and a limited understanding, says Pierre, of ”how the mechanics of life worked”, he was plunged at the age of 16 into chaos, when his father was diagnosed with a brain tumour and removed to New York for treatment. Pierre, or Peter Finlay as he was then, was left to his own devices in a mansion with servants and a sense of growing hysteria as his father deteriorated.
”There came a time,” he says, ”when my mates moved into the house and we had all this money and we started experimenting with things [drugs] and there was no one to oversee it. My father eventually died when I was 19.” He pauses painfully. ”That was a great shock.” He pauses again, folding in on himself. ”In a way.”
Over the next two years things got rapidly worse for the family. ”I think it was a Thursday,” says Pierre, ”when the Mexican government closed all the banks, nationalised them overnight and devalued their currency sixfold. Then floated the currency. We essentially lost … everything.”
He was 21 and felt he had to support the family, or hide from them the extent of the trouble they were in. Pierre started borrowing and lying, and the more he borrowed the more he lied. He told himself that tomorrow something would come up, that maybe tomorrow he could fix it. But the debts mounted and, to stem his panic, he took more drugs and got deeper into debt.
This went on for years, until, says Pierre, he had a huge cocaine habit, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt and on his conscience the ruination of a man called Robert Lenton, who had loaned him or been duped out of (depending on which side you believe) £30 000, which Pierre couldn’t pay back. And so he approached his early 30s in a panic, asking himself, ”How the fuck did I get here? I set out in life not to do any harm. To have friends and to be well thought of. And instead I find myself at the opposite end of that equation. How the fuck could that happen? There’s something really fucking wrong.”
He likens the story of his 20s to ”a fully fuelled jumbo jet just reaching take-off point and having to slam on the brakes. You’ve got this enormous bloody thing careering off the end of the runway, through the fence, through the house next door, bursting into flames and me crawling out and scraping my wounds for 10 years. I won’t be flying that one again.”
This is not a glib compression. The lesson of those years Pierre spent despising himself and eventually coming down on the side of life, if not of happiness, was that he was ”nothing”, unworthy of feeling good about himself. Pierre stands at odds with the cultural consensus that everyone, however rotten, has a right to a basic level of self-esteem. ”But it needs to be ‘based’ on something,” he rages. ”We’re prompted to hold strong opinions and act on them … and think that we’re worth it and, shit, where I’d just been showed me that I wasn’t worth it, my judgement was poor, I was basically nobody. But the culture around me had gone the other way. It didn’t matter what the fuck you were doing as long as you looked good doing it. I finally came to a point when I thought I’ll proceed by being humble, straightforward, very cautious. My default position is one of doubt.”
These are his new foundations, those on which his writing is built. Since a regular job would never have paid off his debts, he threw everything into ”a big and bold stroke” — writing a novel. And he found he was good at it. Today, says Pierre, is ”the peak of hope”. The day before the prize was announced, he rang Lenton and promised to pay back everything he owed with the proceeds from the novel.
Lenton has cautiously forgiven him. There is nothing, Pierre believes, more beautiful in human interaction than the awkward moment or the fluffed exchange, that unformatted instant when a friendship kindles or expires. It could still go either way, but he has, at last, the consolation of honesty.
”People attract to themselves the life that they imagine,” he says. After years of kidding himself on a daily basis, Pierre saves his imaginings for the novels. — Â