Dalrymple on Ballard

In the winter issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple gives the works of J.G. Ballard a splendid rereading, one that may or may not please Ballard. Here’s a sample:

“When I briefly served as a kind of vulgarity correspondent for a British newspaper—it sent me anywhere the British gathered to behave badly—I discovered to my surprise that the middle classes behaved in crowds with the same menacing disinhibition as their supposed social and educational inferiors. They swore and screamed abuse and made fascistic gestures and urinated in the street with the same abandon that they attributed to the proletarians. It was Ballard who first spotted that the bourgeoisie wanted to proletarianize itself without losing its economic privileges or political power.”