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Literally just finished High-Rise last week (which was good but not amazing) and I disagree with the essayist's take here that Ballard's just-good-enough prose
by spondylosaurus 3y ago
Literally just finished High-Rise last week (which was good but not amazing) and I disagree with the essayist's take here that Ballard's just-good-enough prose is somehow reflective of the themes he writes about:
> Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre.
On a page-by-page level, Ballard's prose is honestly pretty bland. Which is okay! But I don't think it's an intentional act of genius. There were so many paragraphs in High-Rise where 3+ sentences would start with a participle phrase, often back to back.
The premise itself of the novel was interesting enough, so I managed to turn off my editor brain and enjoyed it for what it was. But there are novelists whose prose does legitimately mirror themes of alienation or paranoia (Pynchon and DeLillo come to mind) and I don't think Ballard is one of them.
As an aside, I've tried to read Crash at least three times now but the increasingly unbearable sex scenes keep driving me away. Not that I'm scandalized (if anything, I wish I were!)—they're just such a slog to get through. If I have to read the phrase "natal cleft" one more time...
- smallerfish 3y ago> But there are novelists whose prose does legitimately mirror themes of alienation or paranoia (Pynchon and DeLillo come to mind) ...or PKD.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoHa, Ubik is one of the next books on my list!
- richie_adler 3y agoSafe when taken as directed.
- cgh 3y agoIf you haven't already, check out W.G. Sebald ("The Rings of Saturn", "The Emigrants", etc).
- inputError 3y agoHah. Crash is the only book I read cover to cover while actively disliking it. I was stuck in an Alaskan airport for 8 hours and all the other bookstores were closed.
- sincerely 3y agoI actually think the repetitive nature of the sex scenes works for Crash bc it starts to mirror the mechanistic nature of the automobiles and transit systems that excite them. But I realize this is basically the same argument that you disagreed with previously :)
- natalcleft 3y agoHilarious and sounds like a username!
- spondylosaurus 3y agoo7 Enjoy the yonic euphemism, lol.
- cph123 3y agoI got towards the end of High Rise and then didn't finish it, I never really thought about why (other than more interesting books on my shelves), but this makes sense.
- maldusiecle 3y agoI think his prose quality varies widely from work to work. Typically it's not great. In Atrocity Exhibition it's beyond bland, though--almost bureaucratic in its mechanical periphrases, repetitive, clinical and bizarre. I can't imagine that's not intentional. And Crash, if you can stomach it, is outright pungent. At times it reads like an airport novel, at other points it's hallucinatory. Most of the rest is written indifferently, interesting for the ideas but not the writing.