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  I was being dull—but the trouble went deeper than that. James Graham Ballard was a man born on the inside, to the colonial class, that is, to the very marrow of British life; but he broke out of that restrictive mold and went on to establish—uniquely among his literary generation—an autonomous hinterland, not attached to the mainland in any obvious way. I, meanwhile, born on the outside of it all, was hell-bent on breaking in. And so my Ballard encounter—like my encounters, up to that point, with his work—was essentially a missed encounter: ships passing in the night. I liked the Ballard of Empire of the Sun well enough, and enjoyed the few science-fiction stories I’d read, but I did not understand the novels and Crash in particular had always disturbed me, first as a teenager living in the flight path of Heathrow Airport, and then as a young college feminist, warring against “phallocentricism,” not at all in the mood for penises entering the leg wounds of disabled lady drivers.

  What was I so afraid of? Well, firstly that west London psychogeography. I spent much of my adolescence walking through west London, climbing brute concrete stairs—over four-lane roads—to reach the houses of friends, whose windows were often black with the grime of the A41. But this all seemed perfectly natural to me, rational—even beautiful—and to read Ballard’s description of “flyovers overlay[ing] one another like copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other’s legs” was to find the sentimental architecture of my childhood revealed as monstrosity: “The entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter.”

  Those lines are a perfectly accurate description of, say, Neasden along the North Circular, but it can be shocking to be forced to look at the fond and familiar with this degree of clinical precision. (“Novelists should be like scientists,” Ballard once said, “dissecting the cadaver.”) And Ballard was in the business of taking what seems “natural”—what seems normal, familiar and rational—and revealing its psychopathology. As has been noted many times, not least by the author himself, his gift for defamiliarization was, in part, a product of his own unusual biography: “One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set . . . the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it . . . could be dismantled overnight.”At age fifteen, Ballard left decimated Shanghai, where he’d spent the war, for England, to study medicine at Cambridge, and found it understandably difficult to take England seriously. This set him apart from his peers, whose habit it was to take England very seriously indeed. But if his skepticism were the only thing different about Ballard he would not be such an extraordinary writer. Think of that famous shot in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when the camera burrows below the manicured suburban lawn to reveal the swarming, dystopian scene underneath. Ballard’s intention is similar, but more challenging. In Ballard the dystopia is not hidden under anything. Nor is it (as with so many fictional dystopias) a vision of the future. It is not the subtext. It is the text. “After this sort of thing,” asks the car-crash survivor Dr. Helen Remington, “how do people manage to look at a car, let alone drive one?” But drive she does, as we all do, slowing down on motorways to ogle an accident. Like the characters in Crash we are willing participants in what Ballard called “a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions.” The death-drive, Thanatos, is not what drivers secretly feel, it’s what driving explicitly is.

  “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind . . . We live inside an enormous novel . . . The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent reality.” The world as text: Ballard was one of the first British novelists to apply that French theory to his own literary practice. His novels subvert in particular the world that advertising presents, with its irrational convergences sold to us as if they were not only rational but natural. In the case of the automobile, we have long been encouraged to believe there is a natural convergence between such irrational pairs as speed and self-esteem, or leather interiors and family happiness. Ballard insists upon an alternative set of convergences, of the kind we would rather suppress and ignore.

  It is these perverse convergences that drive the cars in Crash, with Ballard’s most notorious creation, Dr. Robert Vaughan, at the wheel, whose “strange vision of the automobile and its real role in our lives” converges with Ballard’s own. And once we are made aware of the existence of these convergences it becomes very hard to un-see them, however much we might want to.

  There is a convergence, for example, between our own soft bodies and the hardware of the dashboard: “The aggressive stylization of this mass-produced cockpit, the exaggerated moldings of the instrument binnacles emphasized my growing sense of a new junction between my own body and the automobile.” There is a convergence between our horror of death and our love of spectacle: “On the roofs of the police cars the warning lights revolved, beckoning more and more passersby to the accident site.” And there is an acute convergence, we now know, between the concept of celebrity and the car crash: “She sat in the damaged car like a deity occupying a shrine readied for her in the blood of a minor member of her congregation . . . the unique contours of her body and personality seemed to transform the crushed vehicle. Her left leg rested on the ground, the door pillar realigning both itself and the dashboard mounting to avoid her knee, almost as if the entire car had deformed itself around her figure in a gesture of homage.”

  This vision of a fictional Elizabeth Taylor—written twenty-five years before the death of Princess Diana—is as prescient as anything in Ballard’s science fiction. How did he get it so right? How did he know that the price we would demand, in return for our worship of the famous and beautiful (with their unique bodies and personalities) would be nothing less than the bloody sacrifice of the worshipped themselves? Oh, there were clues, of course: the myth of decapitated Jayne Mansfield, Jimmy Dean with his prophetic license plate (“Too fast to live, too young to die”), Grace Kelly’s car penetrated by a tree. But only Ballard saw how they were all related, only he drew the line of convergence clearly. Once you see you cannot un-see. What are all the DUIs of Lindsay Lohan if not a form of macabre foreplay?

  Still, it’s easy to be shocked the first time you read Ballard. I was for some reason scandalized by this convergence of sex and wheels, even though it is enshrined in various commonplaces (not to mention the phrase “sex on wheels”). What else do we imply when we say that the purchase of a motorbike represents a “mid-life crisis,” or that a large car is compensation for a lack of endowment? But, of course, in the fictional version of our sexual relationship with cars, it is we, the humans, who are in control; we determine what we do in cars. In Ballard’s reality it is the other way round: “What I noticed about these affairs, which she described in an unembarrassed voice, was the presence in each one of the automobile. All had taken place within a motor-car, either in the multi-story car-park at the airport, in the lubrication bay of her local garage at night, or in the let-downs near the northern circular motorway, as if the presence of the car mediated an element which alone made sense of the sexual act.”

  In 1973, horrified readers condemned such passages as fantastical pornography. Thirty years later, in England, a very similar scene burst onto the front pages and even received an official term: dogging. (And at the center of that scandal was one of the biggest television stars in the country, natch.) The real shock of Crash is not that people have sex in or near cars, but that technology has entered into even our most intimate human relations. Not man-as-technology-forming but technology-as-man-forming. We had hints of this, too, a long time ago, in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which makes explicit the modernist desire to replace our ancient gods and myths with the sleek lines and violent lessons of the automobile. It also fea
tures an orgasmic car crash: “When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!”

  But Marinetti’s prose is overwrought, deliberately absurd (“We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach”) where Ballard is calm and collected. That medic’s eye, dispassionate, ruthless: “Braced on his left elbow, he continued to work himself against the girl’s hand, as if taking part in a dance of severely stylized postures that celebrated the design and electronics, speed and direction of an advanced kind of automobile.”

  Marinetti’s hot-headed poets and artists wrestled with the icon of the motorcar. Ballard’s ciphers coolly appraise it. The iciness of Ballard’s style is partly a consequence of inverting the power balance between people and technology, which in turn deprives his characters of things like interiority and individual agency. They seem mass-produced, just like the things they make and buy. Certainly his narrators and narrators manqués are not concerned with the personalities of human beings: “Vaughan’s interest in myself was clearly minimal; what concerned him was not the behavior of a 40-year-old producer of television commercials but the interaction between an anonymous individual and his car, the transits of his body across the polished cellulose panels and vinyl seating, his face silhouetted against the instrument dials.”

  It’s almost as if the stalker-sadist Vaughan looks at humans as walking-talking examples of that Wittgensteinian proposal: “Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the use.” When Ballard called Crash the first “pornographic novel about technology,” he referred not only to a certain kind of content but to pornography as an organizing principle, perhaps the purest example of humans “asking for the use.” In Crash, though, the distinction between humans and things has become too small to be meaningful. In effect things are using things. (And a crazed stalker like Vaughan becomes the model for a new kind of narrative perspective.)

  Now, I don’t think it can be seriously denied that some of the deadening narrative traits of pornography can be found here: flatness, repetition, circularity. “Blood, semen and engine coolant” converge on several pages, and the sexual episodes repeat like trauma. But surely this flatness is deliberate; it is with the banality of our psychopathology that Ballard is concerned: “The same calm but curious gaze, as if she were still undecided how to make use of me, was fixed on my face shortly afterward as I stopped the car on a deserted service road among the reservoirs to the west of the airport.”

  That seems to me a quintessential Ballardian sentence, depicting a denatured landscape in which people don’t so much communicate as exchange mass-produced gestures. (Reservoirs are to Ballard what clouds were to Wordsworth.) Of course, it was not this lack of human interiority that created the furious moral panic around this book (and later David Cronenberg’s film). That was more about the whole idea of penetrating the wound of a disabled lady. I was in college when the Daily Mail went to war with the movie, and found myself unpleasantly aligned with the censors, my own faux-feminism existing in a Venn diagram with their righteous indignation. We were both wrong: Crash is not about humiliating the disabled or debasing women, and in fact the Mail’s campaign is a chilling lesson in how a superficial manipulation of liberal identity politics can be used to silence a genuinely protesting voice, one that is trying to speak for us all. No one doubts that the abled use the disabled, or that men use women. But Crash is an existential book about how everybody uses everything. How everything uses everybody. And yet it is not a hopeless vision:

  The silence continued. Here and there a driver shifted behind his steering wheel, trapped uncomfortably in the hot sunlight, and I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped. The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.

  In Ballard’s work there is always this mix of futuristic dread and excitement, a sweet spot where dystopia and utopia converge. For we cannot say we haven’t got precisely what we dreamed of, what we always wanted, so badly. The dreams have arrived, all of them: instantaneous, global communication, virtual immersion, bio-technology. These were the dreams. And calm and curious, pointing out every new convergence, Ballard reminds us that dreams are often perverse.

  THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA BY HANIF KUREISHI

  Many kinds of contraband got passed around our school: cigarettes, drugs, porn mags, video nasties, every now and then some poor fool’s diary—but books were not considered hot property. The Buddha of Suburbia changed all that. It was moving surreptitiously around our history class, it had one page folded, so that anyone who cared to could read the following line:

  “Now, Karim, I want you to put some ice up my cunt. Would you mind going to the fridge?”

  To see this expletive inside a book—instead of on a wall—was, in and of itself, very good value. But there was also something truly striking in seeing a name like Karim, familiar to us—though rarely seen in typeface—sitting there calmly only nine words away from the word “cunt.” Kureishi was another familiar name, we had a Kureishi in our class (spelled with a Q), and felt we recognized the world of this novel, at least as it was depicted on the front of that first edition: the cream living room with the bad curtains, the lady in the sari, some mysterious old white people of probable renown, a lone Tory boy, a few pretty, posh English roses and a psychedelic-looking Indian with a red headband. Word got round that there was a useful, masturbatory section depicting an orgy, somewhere around page 205 (you can go look it up now if you like; I’ll wait), and I confess I hurried down to our local W. H. Smith primarily for that reason. I meant to skim-read the thing, the way you skim-read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, leaping over paragraphs in search of genitals. But it was not possible to skip over those opening lines:

  My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care—Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.

  This was thrilling. I had no idea you could start a book like that. In school we were reading—per the syllabus—Austen, Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Iris Murdoch. Consequently I thought an English sentence was a kind of cat-o’-nine-tails, to be used, primarily, as a tool for whipping children into submission. I didn’t know you could speak to a reader like this, as if they were your equal—as if they were a friend. I’d had a hint of it with Holden Caulfield, but at some fundamental level Holden always remained exotic: an American prep-school kid suffering from ennui. There were Dickens’s various waifs and strays, often closer in postcode, but distant in time. Karim was different, I knew him; I recognized the way class worked in his family, the complex mix of working- and lower-middle-class realities, and all the strange gradations that can exist between these two states. And of course he was one of the “new breed,” like me, like so many kids in our school, although the only other mentions of us I’d ever come across before were all of the “tragic mulatto” variety. But the kids I knew were not tragic. They were like Karim: pushy, wild, charismatic, street-smart, impudent, often hilarious. Despite their relatively lowly position in the British class system they suspected they were cool, and knew they had talent and brains. They felt special, even if the rest of the world thought they were marginal. “Although I hated inequality,” explains Karim, “it didn’t mean I wanted to be treated like everyone else.” Yes, exactly that. But how did he know so much about us, this Kureishi person, born in south London, twenty years earlier? Yet he knew:

  Past turdy parks, past the Victorian school with
outside toilets, past the numerous bomb sites which were our true playgrounds and sexual schools, and past the neat gardens and scores of front rooms containing familiar strangers and televisions shining like dying lights.

  He seemed to be walking through the neighborhood. He knew the school (“One day the woodwork teacher had a heart attack right in front of our eyes as one of the lads put another kid’s prick in a vice and started to turn the handle.” In our school, it was the kid’s head.)* He had certainly visited the high street: “They were fanatical shoppers [. . .] Shopping was to them what the rumba and singing is to Brazilians.” And he was in my house. I cringed through Eva’s pseudo Buddhist evenings; they reminded me, unfairly, of my own mother’s recent forays into sophisticated culture, especially the (perfectly innocent, I see now) attempt to gather some friends for dinner to offer them what she believed, at the time, to be sushi. Pretentious young Charlie with Keats in his pocket (“The book was extracted and opened [. . .] Charlie imbibed a beakerful of the warm south”) reminded me of, well, pretentious young me with Keats in my pocket. As much as I laughed, at times it was painful to read, and some of the most painful details were, paradoxically, the ones that seemed invested with the most love. I owe a lot, both personally and professionally, to Kureishi’s account of the strange relationship that can exist between first-generation immigrants and their children. Back in 1990 many self-serious think-pieces were being written on the subject, but none of them was more psychologically acute, or more intimate, than his fictional version. “I like having you with me, boy,” explains Karim’s father, “I love you very much. We’re growing up together, we are.” The child is trying to find his way through adolescence; the father is trying to find his way through a country. These two events are happening simultaneously. You’re growing up together. What a beautiful, painful way to put it. “The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac,” Eva informs Karim one evening, “is reread him at thirty-eight.” Rereading Kureishi now, at exactly that age, I find the opposite. I get the same thrill, the same perverse pleasure, all of it made a little stronger by nostalgia. Perversity is the central sensibility of The Buddha of Suburbia: it’s a book that refuses to toe the party line. In his role as narrator, Karim is rude where you might expect piety, fractious where you were counting on peace, and queer where it would have been far easier, at the time, to play it straight. Even the most innocuous sentences never quite end as you might expect: “One day Anwar made a serious mistake in the betting shop and won a lot of money.” Or: “I was in my usual state; I had no money. Things were so desperate it had become necessary for me to work.” The immigrants here are not always good and hardworking, and Karim is neither consistently right-on nor especially grateful. There is an equal-opportunity policy here when it comes to bad behavior; everyone is shown to be capable of it. Received ideas—particularly about race and class—are gleefully upended in such a way as to annoy both sides of the usual debates: