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Synopsis:
In Ballard’s hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a “TV scientist” turned “nightmare angel of the highways,” experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting edge fiction, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society’s increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.
Review:
I have wanted to read Crash by J.G. Ballard for a long time. Since seeing the David Cronenberg film in the late 90s, I have been looking for a copy of the novel. It is not one that I wanted to buy online or in a digital format. I wanted to find a physical copy in a physical bookstore. I found a new copy late last summer, and I tried to start reading it right off. After three restarts, I finally was able to get through the short novel. My copy is now beat up, with covers creased, pages folded and torn, aged from being in the trunk of my car, and now it is much more distressed that normal. For some reason, the more beat up became, the more I felt like it is how any copy of Crash should appear.
Crash starts with the narrator, James Ballard in a car wreck where he kills the husband of a doctor. During this event, he meets Vaughan, a strange man who chases car crashes to take photos of them. He also recreates historic car crashes and is completely sexually aroused by crashes, injuries, and deaths. Shortly after meeting Ballard, they become friends looking for crashes and sexual partners. They drive around, getting prostitutes at the airport, sharing partners and each other, while planning the greatest car crash of all time, the one that will kill Elizabeth Taylor.
When Ballard (the character) gets into a wreck that actually kills someone, he becomes a member of this group who find car crashes erotic. This could be because he is face to face with death, not his own but one he causes, and with the help of Vaughan and his small group of friends, this horror turns into something that he finds as a catalyst to a new life of cars and sexual obsession. The thing that could have been better, to make this more appealing, is to have Ballard as someone who is not already having extramarital affairs, who did not already seem like he was obsessed with sex. He is in the car crash on the way home from seeing his secretary, with whom he had been having an affair for a long time. He also knows that his wife is having affairs. If they were more of monogamous before the crash, and then Vaughan got him (and his wife) into the lifestyle that they ultimately finds, I would be more interested in what happens to Ballard. In the end, Ballard is not very different than he was before his crash, except that he and his wife are more honest about taking other lovers, and this makes me not really care much for what happens to him. He is not the most interesting character because we have Vaughan, the scarred and deranged man who has started this group of car crash lovers, but there is not enough backstory on him except he used to be handsome and famous until a car crash scarred him and now he was doing this, hanging around crashes, getting chased off by the police, and being a nuisance. We do not learn enough about him because Ballad (the character) is more interested in having sex with everyone than in finding out why he is acting the way that he is acting.
I understand the point of this novel. I know that it is about the glamorization of violence and the way society likes to obsess about tragedy, to the point where it is almost a sexual obsession. It may not be car crashes, but we definitely have an attraction to crime and criminals, especially if they are attractive. Ballard (the novelist) turns this into a over the top reaction, one where the characters cannot see a car crash with having orgasm, and need more and more. In the end, I am glad that I read this, but it is probably not a book I will read again. To put it bluntly, Ballard (the character) is not someone who can see anything passed his penis, and so this really puts a damper on the way that Crash develops and the impact that is could have made.
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