Crash by J.G. Ballard. You’d be hard-pressed to find a novel as sexually perverse as this one. The story is about a man who discovers a latent erotic desire built around cars—more specifically, crashed cars. He develops this sensuality with his injuries; he makes love with his partner with an inordinate fixation on them. When he makes love with other women, and eventually a man, the entire core of arousal is centered on their scars, injuries, in other words, marks of violence. He soon finds that another even more sexually deviant man is watching him. Vaughan. This man is like a cult leader for crash victims from which “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology” emerges. His ultimate aim is to involve himself in a sort of orgiastic fantasy of death intertwined with the movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
The book is as shocking and as strange as you might expect. It was first published in 1973. Upon its release, the reception was a mixed bag. Some said it was appalling and ridiculous all at once. Others, perhaps, found it exciting and different. In my view, Crash is a story about an obsession with technology; Ballard takes humanity’s fascination and technological progression to an extreme. The demolished vehicles that the characters have sex in are inseparable from themselves in the sexual act. They become one. And in becoming one, they enshrine and permit an obsession with the ultimate union of pleasure and pain.
The frequency with which the characters have sex is a little excessive to the point where I don’t find it believable. There also isn’t much of a plot, which some readers might dislike. After the inciting incident, the rest of the book is mostly about the characters having increasingly risqué affairs with one another as they inch closer to realizing Vaughan’s goal of dying in a climactic synchronization with film actress Elizabeth Taylor.
Comments