Like many readers, Zadie Smith was scandalised by Crash, the first 'pornographic novel about technology'. She reflects on why she changed her mind about the novel – and her disastrous meeting with the author

James Spader in David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of Crash.
James Spader in David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of Crash. © Allstar/Cinetext/Columbia Tristar

I  met JG Ballard once – it was a car crash. We were sailing down the Thames in the middle of the night, I don't remember why. A British Council thing, maybe? The boat was full of young British writers, many of them drunk, and a few had begun hurling a stack of cheap conference chairs over the hull into the water. I was 23,  …

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 mould 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 – …

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 overla[ying] 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 defamiliarisation 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."