I read Crash hoping, as I’d heard, that it might present a psychological hazard to me as an automobile owner. Unfortunately, my squishy-looking car and all the other twenty-first century eyesores failed to arouse me to cream my fellow motorists as I might have in Ballard’s world of boxy, dangerous angles, bluntly slamming together without so much frigid crumpling. As such I have to say, the experience is better if you look up car models as they’re mentioned.

As I read, the whole time I got this pervasive feeling of idleness (in a good way). The language is medical and precise and apathetic. Everyone in this world is bored as hell and happens to share the same latent paraphilia, on the edge of awakening if only the unstoppable force of technology would break their legs. 

Ballard’s cars are shiny alien arthropods full of soft human flesh just begging to be impaled and rescued from the boredom of each other. They merge with this landscape of airports and highways that ordinarily is painfully sterile, filling it with eroticism so long as they play by its rules. They welcome the dominance of the technological world over the human body. The idea of technological oppression certainly isn’t new and it wasn’t fifty years ago, but the sexual element is nonetheless intriguing. 

I was pleasantly immersed in the simultaneous hazy dreaminess and the clear feeling that I was watching a frog be dissected. Ballard picks apart and labels every interaction, emotion, and object that appears, although at a certain point the focus becomes repetitive. A lot of the overused diction is clearly necessary with regard to medical and structural terms and frankly adds a lot to the novel, but the more figurative choices, especially sticking out by nature as they do, get a bit grating. 

Regarding the obscenity, scene-by-scene, it never felt like it was actually going for shock value. The whole of the book, perhaps (as an NYT review at the time of release said, “Crash is, hands-down, the most repulsive book I've yet to come across.”), but it read pretty earnestly, though I’m not sure if that was the intention. 

Anyways, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I recommend it. Don’t read it in public.