Crash (1973)

Boring!

Did you ever read a novel where you really did wish everyone would be hit by a truck at the end?

This book might just be the pinnacle of objectification, which I am sure is what Ballard wanted, but the tedious clinical detailing of the protagonist's perversions and anatomical and necrotic fantasies were just dull. Not shocking, not titillating, not interesting, not erotic, just dull, dull, dull.

Ballard can write a good SHORT story, and if Crash is any indication, that is where he should stay. ( )

Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.

This book isn't for everyone. It's a story of the violent melding of technology and human sexuality, written with all of the eroticism of a technical manual. It's brutal and vulgar and hopeless, but for those willing to engage with it --and I fully understand why many would not want to--there is a fascinating examination of the relationship between humans and their creations. ( )

This & Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition" were the peak of his psychopathology of urban living novels. When Cronenberg was making his movie version in Toronto in 1995, I had an acquaintance who was an actor auditioning for the main role ask the casting folks if an obscure composer (myself) wd be considered for the soundtrack. Nope, Howard Shore was always the man. I'd wanted to record samples of all machine noises & substitute them for &/or underlay them w/ all human sounds. Anyway, when the movie came out, I HATED it. For that matter, I hated his version of "[b:Naked Lunch|7437|Naked Lunch The Restored Text|William S. Burroughs|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1219259455s/7437.jpg|4055]" too (although I at least like the way he emphasizes the importance of Burroughs' utterly stupid shooting of his wife). I wonder: Wd I like it more now? Ballard's characters always struck me as lunatic fringe roughnecks & Cronenberg kindof turned them into soft-porn fashion models. Or so it seemed to me at the time. Now, though, it almost seems like C's take is even more critical than B's. As if his movie of "Crash" is like an anti-car ad. Something we cd certainly use. C's version is like a parody of a rich car dealer's sex fantasy. ( )

Much like the other Ballard texts I have read, I found Crash 'hyper-masculine' and too classically futurist in its disdain for women to enjoy. Ballard seems to me an 'ideas-writer' who creates very clever concepts which, for me personally, fail in execution.

"Even as I placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me." Crash, page 172

That pretty much sums up Ballard’s attempt to, I don’t know, shock the world into realising how horrible we all are, maybe.

To be honest, having read it, I have no idea why anyone would want to write a novel like this, would want to put into other people’s minds images of animal sex and the results of the lack of attention to car safety in the 1970s.

Except to shock people into thinking humanity is a mess.

If so, the approach to take to the book is simple: if you know humanity is a mess and that not a single one of us contains an ounce of goodness unless by God’s saving grace through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, you don’t need to read it.

If you don’t believe that and still think people are somehow good at heart or all have the potential to be good if they try hard enough, read Crash until you decide otherwise.

At that point, you can stop reading.

If you get all the way through and think that a more accurate description of the human condition is portrayed by Little Women or anything by Jane Austen, then you are truly the lost soul that Ballard was writing about when he created the character Vaughan. ( )