One of the great secrets of modern life is that we don’t actually want what we want. Instead, we want to go on wanting, luxuriating in our deprivation. The British novelist J.G. Ballard, a lifelong foe of gratified desire, predicted our predicament with eerie prescience. In two essential novels reissued by Picador, the exquisitely grotesque Crash (1973) and the eerily civilized Super-Cannes (2000), Ballard warns against the lures of easy satisfaction.

Reviewers have often called Ballard’s dystopian visions “prophetic”: He foresaw self-driving cars, Uber-style ridesharing, and the lavish corporate campuses where life and labor blur into one another. But perhaps his canniest forecast was that comfort would prove so lethally uncomfortable. “Suburbs,” he reflected in an interview in the Paris Review,

are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one’s got to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one’s freedom. It needn’t be much; kicking the dog will do.



CRASH by J.G. Ballard Picador, 224 pp., $17

Super-Cannes is set in such a suburb: Eden-Olympia is a corporate park on the outskirts of Cannes in “Europe’s silicon valley.” In the techno-utopian patois of Wilder Penrose, the community’s resident psychiatrist, the park is an “ideas laboratory for the new millennium,” an office-cum-resort outfitted with athletic facilities, stores where residents who see shopping as a “folkloric ritual” can browse in person, and a cushy hospital that treated Jacques Chirac when he “sprained his thumb opening an oyster at Colombe D’Or.” The high-power executives who live there never have—or want—to leave.

Penrose anticipates the likes of Google’s nap pods when he explains Eden-Olympia’s strategy to its newest residents, a British pediatrician named Jane and her hapless husband Paul. The way to maximize productivity, Penrose tells the pair, is to “make the office feel like a home—if anything the real home.” Labor permeates leisure: the lavish workplaces of Eden-Olympia have “service stations, where people sleep and ablute.”

But the crystalline pools gleaming behind each mansion are filled with “unsettled water,” and “a dream of violence” hovers over their “manicured lawns.” Jane and Paul are dismayed to find they’ve been allotted the house that belonged to David Greenwood—a seemingly well-adjusted doctor who founded an orphanage for troubled youth before he went on an unexplained killing spree, shooting several of his co-workers and, ultimately, himself. The house he left behind is haunted by reminders of his mysterious life. Bullets glint at the bottom of the pool, and Paul discovers a library of Alice in Wonderland books that Greenwood lent out to his charges at the orphanage.