Australian DBC “Dirty But Clean” Pierre looked like a one hit wonder. “Vernon God Little,”his debut, shocked some readers with its lighthearted treatment of a Columbine-like incident in central Texas. At a time of widespread anti-American feeling, “Vernon God Little” made easy sport of American stereotypes. Obesity, Air Jordan tennis shoes, and a sometimes-convincing Texan idiom won Mr. Pierre the 2003 Man Booker prize, while his short-listed competitors – Monica Ali, Margaret Atwood, and Damon Galgut – were left looking a little stiff.The chairman of the judges called the book “a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America,” as good as admitting that this controversial comic novel was simply in the right place at the right time.

Actually looking at the book, however, exposed a different story. The first sentence was not “coruscating,” but awkward and writerly.”It’s hot as hell in Martirio, but the papers on the porch are icy with the news,” Mr. Pierre writes, not sure whether he’s writing a Western or a noir. But just when the book has about buried itself the teenage narrator starts talking like a gifted, affecting young poet. He’s wondering why his best friend has gone postal, remembering the sweet times before adolescence: “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.” But then he lapses back into his doomed poncey impression of prairie eloquence: “We razed the wilds outside town with his dad’s gun, terrorized ole beer cans, watermelons, and trash.”

Mr. Pierre’s rise, then, had as much to do with literary train spotting as with politics.Mr.Pierre’s appeal lay in his uneven prose, which interleaved the brilliant with the dirty, confusing them when possible – his lack of polish just looked like more “scabrousness,” as his blurb-writers might say. It would be fun to see the lad improve.

“Ludmilla’s Broken English” (Norton, 326 pages, $24.95), Mr. Pierre’s second novel, has little of its predecessor’s political purchase, but it does represent a legitimate improvement in style. In other words, the good parts of “Vernon God Little,” the humane poetic voices that sometimes peeped through the garbage, get more lines, and the cultural offense is saved for the Russians.

But “Ludmilla” is far from perfect. Structurally, it shuffles between two very fictional narratives. In one, a tragicomic Armenia imagined by Gary Shteyngart – or, to put it more kindly, by Vladimir Voinovich – is populated by villagers who speak with the malapropistic brilliance of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Alexander Perchov. Titular Ludmila is the competent scion of an incompetent family, and she drives a tractor to the provincial capital, looking for work, but all she finds is a place on a Russian Brides Web site.

Meanwhile, two conjoined twins,separated at the late age of 33, ride the tide of health care privatization to a bedsit in London. Blair is strong and hormonal, lapping up the language of corporate uplift: “Do you think the governors would rather we integrated and got on with building a constructive future, or lolled about in the bath all day whining for a cooked breakfast,” he asks his twin, Bunny, the parasite of the pair, whose withered body and 33 years of institutionalization have not prevented him from getting a ringing tough mastery of wise-ass slang. “You’re on the turn, mate,” he says. When Donald Lamb, a mysterious man from the Home Office shows up at the bedsit, Bunny is, for once, briefly intimidated: “I mean to say, I’m afraid the shark pool’s at the cleaners, we hadn’t expected an evil genius.”

Mr. Pierre writes best when his youths are philosophizing. Bunny develops “a mental tool,” a “gate of acceptance, where one collected new instructions for a reduced life.” “Stay this side of the gate,” he repeats to himself.

Donald Lamb takes the boys to a very fancy disco, where Blair falls in love with a stripper.When Donald has to explain that he’s paid her to talk to Blair, he sees in Blair “the eyes of a toddler abandoned in hell.” So goes the novel, whisking people about in picaresque fashion, fostering gross contrasts. Almost every scene takes the form of a dispute, barbed with Mr. Pierre’s wit and limited by Mr. Pierre’s limitations. The twins discover a drink that, like Benjamin Kunkel’s Abulinix, frees them up to make rash decisions, and sends them to Armenia, looking for Blair’s dream bride.

When Ludmilla finally brings the English twins to her ancestral shack, late in the novel, the long-awaited crosscultural fireworks fizzle. “So you live still,” says one of the villagers, in greeting:

“‘I hope you have good and immediate themes to propose. I hope you’re not swanning around the bars of Zavetnoye living the red life while we suffer every type of new consequence.'”

Writing like this confirms any Texan’s suspicion that Mr. Pierre is a hack linguistic opportunist. “Ludmila’s Broken English,” if conceived as a satire of globalization, plays out as a concatenation of hip fiction.

All that said,”Ludmila’s Broken English” confirms DBC Pierre’s talent. It’s clear that he reads poetry and believes in his bad-boy writerly genius. He overwrites on purpose, yet his overwriting is not enough in itself – he only scores when he scores in traditional literary terms, with straight wit and grace, boyish as it may be. It would be nice to see Mr. Pierre drop out of the social satire race, cut half his jokes, and yet keep his edge.

blytal@nysun.com