Matthew, Book Review, *J.G. Ballard, *Crash

I've been alternately sick and busy as of late, but I finally finished another book on my list: Crash by J.G. Ballard.

Reading Crash (1973) reminded me an awful lot of my experience reading William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch, in that both left me with the distinct impression that Dante really lowballed his idea of what hell could be in the Inferno. The book is narrated by one James Ballard, a television advertising producer who gets into a nasty car crash and is subsequently drawn to become part of a group of people for whom car crashes and sexuality are intrinsically linked.

Yes, you read that correctly: Crash involves sex, violence, and car crashes, but mostly various combinations of the three. Don't get me wrong, the novel isn't all just creepy, nightmarish smut -- it also raises plenty of questions concerning our increasing reliance on and relationship with technology, especially the dangers inherent in allowing those technologies to mediate or even replace our relationships with other human beings. Still, you're going to need a strong stomach if you want to read all the way through to the end. Ballard once explained his reasons for writing the book thusly: "I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror." On that account, I'd say he succeeded.

On another note, I remember seeing Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun on at least one reader's list here. An acquaintance of mine once said that after he finished Crash, he was left wondering what would have to happen to a person to make them write a book like that; after reading Empire of the Sun, he thought, "yeah, that would probably do it." Make of that what you will.