Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
Believe It or Not
By Robert Towers
The Kindness of Women
by J.G. Ballard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 343 pp., $19.95
Prolific and astonishingly inventive, J.G. Ballard has in the last quarter century established himself as perhaps the most 'literary' of contemporary writers of science fiction. His highly idiosyncratic stories and novels have won the enthusiastic endorsement of Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, and Susan Sontag as well as (more predictably) Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin. But the term 'science fiction' is itself questionable when applied to Ballard's work, which has more in common with the imaginary cities of Calvino and the scholarly conundrums of Borges (though it lacks their playfulness and wit) or with the paranoid projections of Pynchon and Burroughs than with the space odysseys usually associated with the label. Recently, with Empire of the Sun and with the book under review, he has moved (almost) altogether from the realm of the fantastic to experiment with a hybrid of fiction and autobiography that seems to me to confuse genres in ways that are troubling.
Review, 2784 words
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