Summary
I remember coming across the Wikipedia summary for this book after Baudrillard did an analysis in his bewildering Simulacra and Simulation, which read:
It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents. At the time, I thought it was a strange summary, maybe a typo or something—after all, it doesn’t make any sense! So I, in my naivete, tucked this away in the “read later” list. I’ve read the book and can confirm the above sentence is a valid summary.
The book opens with the main character, who is named after the author, looking at the recently deceased Dr. Robert Vaughan. Vaughan had just died in a self-inflicted car crash, but in a twist, it wasn’t a suicidal crash but a sort of sexual apogee. Each of the main characters in the book had experienced a car crash that had altered them in such a way as to transform automobiles and the violence of their collisions into a locus of a new sexuality. As Ballard put it:
a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology Ballard reveals how our relationship with technology is a two-way street: we shape it, but it also shapes us—particularly our desires. The main character’s job as an “Ad man” is no accident. Consider how cars are marketed: yes, there’s the stereotype of sexy women draped over hoods, but look closer and you’ll see those same “sexy” design features built into the cars themselves. It would be easy to dismiss this as clever marketing, but Ballard suggests something deeper is happening.
Take modern Snapchat filters—they create idealized humans that don’t exist, yet we embrace them precisely because they’re “better” than reality. In both cases, technology isn’t just channeling our desires—it’s actively reshaping what we desire in the first place.
And that’s the story. If you are expecting there to be more to the plot or other events in the book, you would be mistaken. Ballard spends the entire book obsessively exploring this idea.
Thoughts
In 1973, a New York Times reviewer said:
Crash is, hands-down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across. I would have to agree—it is a catastrophic event. Ironically, it reminds me of the way everyone slows down to look at a wreck on the interstate. What are we hoping to see?
I think, in some ways, this is another one of Ballard’s reasons for writing this book. It is filled to the brim with pornographic experiences, but they are all documented as if by a mortician. Every anatomical part stripped from context, labeled, and filed away as evidence.
It is a dystopian future: objectification without limitation. I don’t think I would recommend anyone read this book, in the same way I wouldn’t recommend anyone look at automobile collisions on the side of the road.