Crash Paperback – October 5, 2001

I would love to say that this was a fascinating warning against our ever growing dependence on technology and how it has changed us to were we are more connected to the inanimate than the animate. I would love to say that this book was an extraordinary work of provocative literary fiction and how it made me think and challenged my views on sexuality and the world around me.... But I can't. Because this book was an amazing, hard to put down, unbelieveably graphic, in depth, fantasized look at people with car-crash-fetishes.James Ballard a director (I think) of commercials gets into a serious car accident that kills the driver of the other vehicle involved and forever changes James and the victim's wife. Through the strange and sometimes dangerous eyes of a deranged man, Dr. Robert Vaughn, who also had long ago been in a life altering crash, they discover the sexuality of the pairing of their bodies with automobiles and the eroticism of car crashes. (I'm pretty sure others who are die-hard fans of this book will scoff at my paultry description of the book, but that's basically what this book is about.)I enjoyed the book because it was different-- definitely an alternative in eroticism-- and gave me a glimpse of how people react differently to tragedies or the unthinkable. I can't say I walked away from the book with a more enlightened view of anything, but I can say I walked away with satisfaction.The only complaint I have is the tone of the book: It was monotone. There were so many instances in the book were I knew I needed to feel something-- astonishment, horror, grief, lust-- but they were lost in the one page long, overly detailed, paragraphs. I have read 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera so I am familiar with this type of style but I think for this book empahsis-- ie. shorter paragraphs-- were needed to punctuate the scenes. And his switches in scenes and times of day and character actions completely threw me off because they were not actually stated. It was more of an aftethought. The author's main focus was telling the story and making sure the reader understood that there was semen *everywhere* and vulvas being penetrated constantly. Sounds a bit much for a review, right? Read the book and you'll see that what I said was practically G-Rated.All in all... good book.

In the 1970's, J G Ballard focused on controversial themes of sex, excess, and nightmarish scenes that disturbs the reader four decades or more later. From "High Rise", (1975); to "The Atrocity Exhibition", (1972). "Crash', is about Ballard, who is turned on by car crashes, as he meets various people: Vaughn, (a man who fuses technology is sex), while the characters over-indulge in behaviour that makes it an uncomfortable read. It is world's away from "The Drowned World", (1962), Ballard's science-fiction novel, to the well-known autobiographical "Empire of the Sun", (1984), (filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987)."Crash", which was filmed in Canada by David Cronenberg in 1996, translates the novel to be a romantic thrill-ride that is hit-and miss with James Spader, Holly Hunter, and Rosanna Arquette. In short, "Crash" is a dazzling, futuristic, and voyeuristic book, that couldn't be written today, (in 2019). But it is an important book to read, as is all of Ballard's work before and after "Crash" ends at just over two hundred pages or so.

About a year ago I was driving down the interstate when I noticed a few police cruisers up ahead, their lights blaring, parked in uniformed manor on the side of the road, just under the overpass. As I approached, slowing down with the flow of traffic that always seems to coagulate in front of a crash, I noticed the front end of a black sedan, the make and model escape me, smashed in and almost nonexistent. The windshield was completely gone; glass littering the pavement, and a young and beautiful woman was lying over the steering wheel facing out at the passing vehicles. I remember staring at her face, her dark hair falling over her bloodstained face, her eyes closed to her wounds, her jaw swollen and bruised, her neck black from the impact against the wheel, and I couldn't help but feel this overwhelming sadness that was masked in a strange serenity. She looked so peaceful, so calm in her death. It was at that moment that I decided to read J.G. Ballard's novel `Crash'. I had heard a lot about it and had wanted to give it a read through. Now this happened to me a year ago, but I just finished his novel about three minutes ago. I just never really got around to reading it, but about a week ago I finally delved in.I will say this, that all the controversy surrounding this novel is very well deserved. `Crash' is not a novel for the weak of stomach or the faint of heart. It's outlandish and blunt, straightforward and explicit. I will say that I was turned off a bit at times and in the end am ultimately disappointed with Ballard's execution of his prose. The novel itself would have blossomed had Ballard used a little more subtlety and tact, but instead he went for the gusto and shock-value of his events, high on perversion and blatant grime with mixed results. Some have likened this novel the `Fight Club' but in my opinion what Palahniuk did with `Fight Club' is far superior to what Ballard does here.The very idea that sex is linked to the heart of human emotion is a very essential point to the understanding of this novel. It's also a very true statement. Sex is the most universally understood way that any living breathing creature can express themselves. We can convey happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion, lust...you name it and we can express it through the otherwise intimate act of sexual intercourse. Throughout Ballard's novel the characters talk of an awakened sexuality due to their automobile accidents, but in actuality the prose has the opportunity to carry much more weight than that. I strongly fell that it was poor judgment on Ballard's part to make this novel as explicit as it was. If you look at another extremely controversial novel `American Psycho' you will see the advantages to the use of subtlety. Bret Easton Ellis understood the power of the underlying motive, and so while `American Psycho' has it many moments of grotesque macabre it still ushers in the serene examples of pure mood changes and allows the reader to wrap their head around the real meaning of the atrocity. `Crash' just paints a lurid and abnormal picture without giving us to opportunity to grasp what this all could have meant.I don't know if I'll ever really understand why some laud this novel. It attempts to convey a deep meaning but in my opinion it fails to capitalize on it. It's so intent of shocking the reader that it forgets its purpose and tries to become something it's not. It screams for someone to take it seriously and understand it's tortured implications but it falls flat and far from it's intended destination. In effect, it crashes and burns instead of sours like it could have. Maybe that was the intention though, maybe that is the ultimately ironic conclusion, that a novel so obsessed with the violent link between sex and the car crash would in essence crash in it's attempt to convey an emotional response. I for one am not impressed, but it's a novel that deserves to be read if not to contemplate where Ballard went wrong.

A important book, but nothing compared to the great film adaptation by David Cronenberg. A lot of words do not amount to magnificent images... but the ideas are all there. It really takes a vivid imagination like Cronenberg to see past the smut and the mundaneness...

I feel a wave of relief flood through my body that I have finally finished this book. I found it a painful read.Ballard is clearly a very skilled writer. This is literary fiction, it’s not fluff. I appreciate that many of the elements of this novel that grated on me were purposeful, it’s not supposed to be an enjoyable read.The repetition ground me down. The continuous descriptions of flyovers, traffic, cars, the same repeated scenes all developed a sense of claustrophobia, not only within the body of a car but in the world the narrator inhabits. He lives in a huge city but his world is small.The sexual references would have been incredibly shocking at time of publishing and for many people now they still would shock. Graphic sex scenes I can deal with but faeces, vomit, saliva and mucus turn my stomach.“”I moved my mouth down his abdomen to his damp groin, marked with blood and semen, a faint odour of a woman’s excrement clinging to the shaft of his penis.”I stumbled across an internet chatroom discussion where some posters commented that it wasn’t as shocking as they’d been led to believe. This reminded me of the impact that easy access to porn in this digital age is having on especially teenagers, it’s making them less shockable, it’s inuring them to a far wider range of porn genres than 10 years ago. It’s the same with violent video games and films. This section rang those bells in particular:“My horror and disgust at the sight of these appalling injuries had given way to a lucid acceptance…”There is an apocalyptic and sci-fi vibe to the book. That uncomfortable, other worldly feeling set in 20th century London. Something else that make me twitch a bit were the Americanisms. I don’t know if they’re words that Ballard would have used, whether it was a publishing decision or if they were the norm at the time of writing. I’d always call an “apartment” a “flat” and other examples were “the shopping mall” and “dashboard locker” – isn’t that the glove compartment? Maybe I just know too little about cars!The two references to children’s genitals were beyond the pale. Art schmart, it’s just something I want to delete from my kindle.The star grading system is problematic. It’s a 5 star from a technique perspective but it’s a 1 star from my response to it and whether I’d recommend it to another reader.I read this as it’s one of those books from the contemporary canon of things you should read. Perhaps I don’t have a strong enough stomach, maybe I’m more of a prude than I thought, potentially I just don’t give enough of a fig about cars. Either way, I’m cleansing my eyes next with something overtly commercial.

I used to read and enjoy JG Ballard sci fi novels when I was younger, and I recently found a recommendation for 'Crash', so I ordered it. I have to say it's one of the few books I have ever read (of hundreds) that made me say 'no, no, ,no!' out loud. OK, you can't truly criticize a book if you quit part-way through, so I finished it. But it left a very bad taste in my mouth. So much apparently gratuitous nastiness, and a very weak story line. I don't even want to leave it in a charity shop.

Ballard is a weird man and Crash is a bizarre, sexual, depraved story. The man character (who shares his name with the author) is in a loveless marriage and stable job when he gets into a severe car accident. The accident serves as his sexual awakening, and he is introduced to a group of people whose sexual fantasies revolve around car accidents, wounds, bodily fluids and metal.If anyone asks me in real life what this book is about, I tell them it's car crash porn, and that's not an exaggeration or understatement. It's well written and enjoyable, but it's the only book I have ever taken breaks from. Sometimes I need a minute (or day) to accept the things I just saw happen and reflect on my life. Worth a read though.

I had avoided reading this book as I must have had some lingering memory of the surrounding controversy. It was definitely not a comfortable or cathartic experience but then it was not meant to be. ‘Clinical’ was one word used positively and negatively by critics of Crash and with a little background reading I discovered how appropriate it was. J.G Ballard spent a portion of his childhood in a Japanese prisoner of war camp (chronicled in the novel and film, Empire of the Sun) and later trained as a doctor. In the light of this, perhaps his detached, unfaltering attitude to bodily functions, disease, damage, obsession and general human mess is understandable. I found it an adult book addressing difficult social issues. The essential idea seemed to be that we live in a society that morbidly adores the car and is undeterred or even excited by the destruction it causes both to the human body and the environment. Ballard offers an unsettling and alienating interpretation of this adoration as a physical longing to join flesh with metal, forcing the audience to confront what this perverse and ultimately fatal attraction might look like and to consider its consequences.

Definitely one of the most original and disturbing novels I've read to date. More of a pyschological odyssey than a straightforward narrative. The concept of people being sexually aroused by serious car accidents is original and compelling, but Ballard cannot maintain the suspension of disbelief beyond the first fifty or so pages. Maybe that's the point. It's hard to say with any conviction. A group of people, thrown together quite by chance, having the same sick obsession is the premise of the novel and its least convincing component. A dilemma I never quite shook off. The exposition is gruesome, highly sexualised and rich in evocative metaphor. But it's overdone quantitively; there's just no let up and, most of the time, it feels endless. Personally, I think this would've worked better as a short story. That said, it is a truly remarkable piece of work.