Crash by J.G. Ballard

(Book Review)

Definitely one of the more bizarre things I’ve read recently, this book deals with people who become sexually aroused by car accidents.

In describing human sexuality, a friend of mine once said: “Any possible pervasion you can possibly imagine, you can bet that there are some people somewhere who have a fetish for it and that there is an industry that caters to it.” That caveat aside, to the best of my knowledge, this car accident fetish doesn’t actually exist in reality. It is created in this book as a metaphor for the role of cars in modern life.

Ever since this book was first released in 1973,people have debated whether it is pornography or art. (According to Wikipedia one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish.") The graphic descriptions of sex and car accidents indicate that, if nothing else, the author is trying to push the boundaries.

However beneath all of this there is a larger point. Why are we so in love with cars when they crush and maim our bodies? And when we all know someone who has been killed in a car accident, why do we keep getting back into cars?

I’m not doing a good job of conveying the feeling of the book, but like all good books this needs to be read to be truly experienced. I can’t do it justice in a summary. But after reading repeated descriptions of mangled flesh and automobile described in sexual terms, you do start do wonder: “Yeah, what is it with Americans and their cars? Is it a sexual thing?” (Technically it’s a British book, but I think it applies just as much to us Americans).

The whole book reads like Freud on steroids. It’s not subtle, but you get the point. The only thing I wonder though is did it need to be a whole book? Could not the same objective have been achieved in a short story? At 224 pages, it’s hardly a long book, and yet I felt like I got the point after the first 50, and am not sure what further benefit I got by reading all the way to the end. I also felt many of the images got repetitive.

Stylistically this book was a struggle for me. The prose was very thick (for lack of more insightful literary criticism.) Lots of unusual sentence structures, and possible overuse of the author’s thesaurus. Or, as another friend of mine observed, “He writes in that weird experimental 70s fashion.” Personally I have my doubts as to whether this was typical of the 70s or not, but you get the idea. Despite the voyeuristic content of the subject material, I had a hard time keeping my mind on the book as I struggled through. But ultimately I think a lot of this comes down to personal preference. If you enjoy these experimental type books, you’ll probably have an easier time with this than I did.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
On "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey" Musicologist, Alan W. Pollack, commented: "The shaken (cow?) bell only seems to be incessant. If you manage to track it (come on, you can do it yourself this time), you'll note how neatly it is dropped out and back in over the course of the song; typical Beatlesque attention to detail."

Link of the Day
Via Tom Tomorrow: This is what can happen to American citizens in the post 9/11 world:
Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment

Crash by J.G. Ballard: Book Review (Scripted)