The Atrocity Exhibition

This is a novel (?) that I've wanted to read for a long time, ever since RE/Search reproduced it along with Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden in a half-hearted attempt to re-release banned books. The RE/Search editions had pictures, so I had to find proper editions of these: the Mirbeau at a used bookstore somewhere between the Tenderloin and North Beach, the Ballard at a mall (!) bookstore in England. Guess they've stopped banning it.

I was a bit disappointed. The narrative is nonlinear and fragmented, but in some sense having direction as each segment helps illuminate those that follow. Ballard recommends reading the segments at random, as that is how he wrote it. This is known, in the reading trade, as a bad sign. Still, one of my favorite Ballard shorts, "The Assassination of President Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Race", was included in this book, so I gave it a go.

Essentially, the protagonist has many selves (one in each chapter) who all try to use collections of seemingly unrelated objects (generally, but not exclusively, photos, artwork, and fragments of text) as a catalyst for changing (and understanding) reality. It's hard to get more specific without rewriting the entire book; suffice to say that many of the obsessions found in Ballard's later work are here (Crash and Super-Cannes probably being the most obvious), as well as a few mid-sixties fixations (pop art, the space race, the JFK assassination to name a few).

As experimental fiction, I cannot judge it. As a novel, or as a collection of short stories, it is outshone by virtually everything else Ballard has written. As a window into the mind of the author, however, it is fantastic -- especially the new edition with Ballard's endnotes.