Vernon God Little (2003) was the striking first novel everyone said it was, and seemed to promise better things to come. D.B.C. Pierre had a preternatural way with language, even if it wasn’t always under his control. You could tolerate the sophomoric and tritely executed satire (America is full of fat, stupid, venal people; America is just a great big television show), as it seemed the flawed trying-out of someone who hadn’t found his way to the things he really wanted to write about.

In Ludmila’s Broken English, the splendours are almost all fled, leaving us with incomparable miseries. Pierre still hasn’t found a story worth telling, and he has taken a bath in the worst aspects of his prose style. Vernon God Little was very talented and very flawed; in Ludmila’s Broken English, you can still see the talent, but the book is so dreadful and so morally stupid that early on you stop giving a damn about wasted opportunities, mismanaged gifts and the like. You just want the thing to be over.