Selected Novels | Joanne McNeil on J.G. Ballard

On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist and cultural critic Joanne McNeil about J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island.

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Transcript

Jessica Swoboda  00:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to Selected Novels. Zach, who do we have on the show this week?

Zach Fine  00:21

Hey Jess, we spoke to Joanne McNeil this week. She's the author of Lurking: A Personal History of the Internet and the novel Wrong Way, published in 2024 by FSG. Joanne grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Los Angeles. We spoke to Joanne about J.G. Ballard's novel Concrete Island, which was published in 1974. It was awesome to talk to her. She's something of a J.G. Ballard expert, and had a lot of fascinating insights about the role of grief, alienation and class in Ballard's work. We really enjoyed talking to her, and hope you'll enjoy this episode.

Jessica Swoboda  00:55

And we would love to hear any comments or questions you have, so be sure to send us an email at selectednovels@thepointmag.com and also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. There's a 50% off discount code that's exclusive to listeners in the Episode Notes, So be sure to check those out as well. Well, Joanne, thank you again for joining us. 

Joanne McNeil  01:27

It's great to be here. 

Jessica Swoboda  01:29

So why don't we begin by you introducing us to J.G. Ballard? 

Joanne McNeil  01:34

Sure, the best place to start, I think, is his writing, and he's an incredibly prolific writer. Started out in the Sixties writing science fiction, lot of short stories, a few novellas, somewhat unusual for the genre that they're incredibly surreal and not that much for plot. So he stood out from the beginning of his career, and regularly said that he was inspired by artists like Magritte and Dali. Then in 1970 he publishes this novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, which is kind of a break from what he had been doing before this serious Burroughs-inspired cult novel full of attention grabbing chapter titles like "why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan" and heavy with language that he's borrowed from his training. He went to med school for a couple years, and so he's super fluent in using medical terminology. It doesn't feel like he's reaching for a thesaurus. Right after The Atrocity Exhibition, he publishes three novels, Crash, Concrete Island, which we're going to talk about, and High-Rise. And these are all still kind of sold as science fiction novels, but there's they're set in the present day, and there's really nothing out of the possibility that happens in them. They're just incredibly, again, surreal and about modern life in and around London. And he loved at the time that using a genre like science fiction, he could kind of interrogate the moment of change that he saw was happening in the modern world. And so after those three he publishes another couple novels that I are okay, that some some of them are better than others. Then, 1984 he publishes Empire of the Sun, which is a largely autobiographical novel, and I'll explain the elements of that once I go through his work, and it's the first time he is getting serious recognition from a literary crowd. It's nominated for Booker award, and it's a new readership for him. The novels that come after that are, I feel maybe his weakest work comes in the Eighties and Nineties, and he's kind of lost sight of who he is. There's sometimes a really strong ideas, but the execution is somewhat not there. It's not clear who he is anymore as an author, but then by 2000 he publishes this book, Super-Cannes, which is in some ways a rewrite of his previous novel, Cocaine Nights, and its story of this office park industrial park in the south of France that's kind of like the Silicon Valley of Europe, and it's all about this, like the sordid lives of this executive level, this executive class in modern Europe. It feels very much aligned with this moment of European Union. And the debut of the euro currency, and following that, he publishes another couple of novels that are, I haven't reread them recently, but I remember they were pretty good, and they're in this sort of page turner thriller. You could pick them up at the airport, and like, Super-Cannes to me is like that ultimate airport book, like read on a plane book, but it still delivers on all of his ideas and themes. And then he publishes his autobiography, and he passed away in 2009. 

So there were two major shocks in his life that influenced his writing, the first which he does cover in Empire of the Sun. That was he was born in 1930 in Shanghai, and as a boy, his parents are wealthy British expats. They are sent to an internment camp after the Japanese occupation. And it's a, of course, a powerful experience in his life that shaped his life, because at the age of sixteen, he goes to the U.K. for the first time, and he is experiencing this culture shock after, you know, the the shock that he experienced in in internment camp, and feeling at once part of this middle class and also baffled by it that there's this very small number of people who are this posh, university educated middle class. When he looks around the actual population of the U.K. of is working-class, and there this tension really, really struck him as just so bizarre, like, what are all these codes that keep people in and keep people out? So that was those were two very early shocks in his life, but and also very incredibly powerful and and heartbreaking experience he had was as at the age of, I think he was 34 he's on vacation with his wife, and she suddenly dies. I believe it's pneumonia. He is left with three children, and this is a few years before The Atrocity Exhibition comes out. And in many interviews, he talks about how he's grieving a powerful amount, but also he's he's got the stigma of everyone telling him, just get remarried, send the kids away. He stays in their home in Shepperton, in the suburbs of London, raises the children at some point. He does have a long-term partner, a very good relationship, but I don't believe they lived together. Maybe they did later in his life, but for a long time, she lived in London, and he had his life in Shepperton with the kids, quite isolated. And part of that experience is depicted in one of his novels, The Kindness of Women, which to me is maybe my the novel I'm most frustrated with, because I feel like it's his follow up to Empire of the Sun. I think it comes out in like 1991 or something like that. And I see, like the real beauty of that book is he's talking about the alienation of being with other women after his wife has passed, and that he doesn't know who to be. And I've never really seen grief put that way. And if you see it in terms of the rest his work, which is about the alienation of modern life, the alienation of landscapes, this book could have been like the alienation of like sexual relationships, and he just doesn't quite trust himself, or there's something, there's a lot there that this isn't the book we're talking about, because I'm frustrated with it, but I will say it's still for people who are interested in his work. That's another book that is one of his very interesting books.

Zach Fine  08:55

So could you maybe tell us a little bit about your selection of Concrete Island, and I know you mentioned it comes out in this cluster of novels in the 1970s, but why this novel? Why is this the one that's stuck with you the most?

Joanne McNeil  09:07

Why this novel? The one that stuck, it so it probably helps to explain, like, how I encountered Ballard in the first place. So I was in college in Northern Virginia, and this was like post-911 real surveillance state, Washington, DC. And I was just really baffled by how weird this place was. It wasn't like the suburbs of Boston, where I grew up. There was just something very creepy about it that I felt like the power of institutions in a way I hadn't before. And I just found, you know, I found Super-Cannes face up at a Barnes and Noble and read it, and I needed every single thing he wrote after that. I just, like, ran through all of his novels, and for many years, I just thought of Ballard as, like, all these books that I'd read over the course of two or three years. Yeah, but when he passed away in 2009 that's when I, kind of, I did my first rereading of his work, and it was Concrete Island that really stuck out to me. And I felt like really personally drawn to it, that the characterization was so good. And I for many years after 2009 whenever people would ask me what book to start with, I'd say, well, you know, you should start with High-Rise as, like the good cult novel. It's probably his best novel. Or you should start with Super-Cannes. That's the page turner. It's also like real like zoom through all of his themes and all of his obsessions. But my personal favorite is Concrete Island. It's not a good one to start with, but having before I reread Concrete Island for the podcast, I reread High-Rise, which I hadn't in a really long time, and I felt like it was a little bit too it was almost too obvious, like he was kind of falling into his own cliches. It's very well paced. It's got all the things you want. If you want like a cliffhanger, if you want chapters to fall on a cliffhanger, it's good. But reading that before Concrete Island, rather than in order, I loved how much in Concrete Island, he trusts the reader, and maybe that's now having read them both just this past month, I feel much more confident that, like, I think Concrete Island is his best, I in a way that, like a lot of people would argue with me, but I do.

Zach Fine  11:33

Can you say a little bit more about what you mean there with the trusting of the reader? In what ways do you feel like he's signaling that trust in the book? 

Joanne McNeil  11:40

Oh, there's just, like, the characterization, like, I don't think he's done as he tends to fall back with, like, a lot of stock characters like his. This book has an architect. A lot of his characters are architects. He's married. He has a side piece. He's like, he's a very typical fellow character. But there are just a few little pieces in here that he gestures at and he has fun with. And it's clear that, it's clear that Ballard knows what a cad, what a rake, Robert Maitland is, and he's he's having so much fun at the expense of this character, while also kind of like, you know, trusting that you can get it, and if in reading it, I almost wonder if that trust wasn't fulfilled by criticism. And maybe that's why High-Rise was a little more obvious. Where High-Rise is about like an actual high rise, and the lower, the lowest levels are, where the teachers and the air traffic controllers and the lower classes, he says, is like the lowest of the lower middle class over there. The middle is where you got the doctors and the lawyers, and then the top is like the famous actors and the bankers. And it's just like there is a real, like situation of different factions getting at each other and creating chaos, all within the scope of this high rise. And it's not subtle. It's really not. So this book sometimes falls into a lot of obvious tellings and a lot of his bag of tricks, but I do feel like the character is just, it's such a character driven story at the end, and it's just fun for me, having read most of his work, to see him like openly laugh at one of these men.

Zach Fine  13:23

So for listeners who haven't read Concrete Island yet, could you give us a sketch of the book? 

Joanne McNeil  13:29

Okay, sure. So it's set over the course of about two weeks, and it starts with Robert Maitland, the architect. He is driving from his, the apartment of this mistress in London who he's been staying with for a couple days, back to his wife and son in the suburbs. I believe it's Richmond, which is out in the Wimbledon area. And while he's driving, he gets a flat tire. His car, his Jaguar, swerves out of the way, swerves over the rail, and he ends up in this grassy patch of land underneath the circuit of a freeway traffic. And Robert believes that escape should be quite easy. He is. The first couple chapters are more about his shock, that he's wiping the pieces of the shards of the windshield off himself. He's just like, he's stunned that this happened, but he never really distrust that people are going to find him. But over the course of the first 48 hours, which I think is kind of like the first half of the book, is really those first days that he's he's marooned there on this island. He realizes it's not as easy as he thought, and so he has these like each chapter in the first half is like a new harebrained scheme that he tries to get attention, to get someone, to get him back to his house. And if they just, you know, he sets fire to the Jaguar. And it isn't like this big bonfire that he imagined, he, like, he uses pieces of the cart, like, write down help on like, it's just like all of the he goes through all these kind of, like, weird, like almost surreal ways of being discovered without, like, the real, obvious ones he doesn't as thoroughly investigate. But then, so about halfway through the book, these two people who have been squatting in part of the underground, which would be like an air raid shelter in a cinema. At this point in the book, you realize the highway kind of cuts through all these derelict properties that used to be a neighborhood, and these two people have been squatting. They're a young woman and this older man, who was an acrobat that's experienced some kind of injury and has experienced cognitive decline. And his interactions with these people make up the second half of the book. And like this, you see him not quite growing necessarily, but falling more, becoming even more set in his ways. And that's, that's the rough sketch of this book. 

Jessica Swoboda  16:14

Yeah, I find it so interesting, the moments where he's like, I'm going to escape. And then he's like, no, I'm going to keep staying here and that back and forth. And I wonder what we're supposed to make of that back and forth. 

Joanne McNeil  16:26

Yeah, because at first, like, I think anybody reading this book would just imagine you know, if you end up marooned somewhere you want to escape. But yeah, he's got this internal conflict of, like, do I even want to but then also his methods are just so strange, it''s really like he has this very strong connection to the Jaguar too, that, like, the Jaguar becomes this nurturing form. To me, one of the funniest parts of the book is that he reaches for the water in the windshield wiper, for the winter shield wiper. He uses that for drinking water. And when it rains, he refills the container. And it's just like he's so connected to this vehicle. It's very, very funny.

Jessica Swoboda  17:26

The passage you picked actually mentions him drinking from that reservoir. So why don't we turn there? And can you read that for us please? 

Joanne McNeil  17:34

Sure. "He realized, above all that, the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island, that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway. Was completely false part of that whole system of comfortable expectations he had carried with him, given the particular topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all, given to the circumstances of his private and professional life, the once so convenient division between his wife and Dr Helen Fairfax, it might be at least a week before anyone was sufficiently suspicious to call the police. Yet even the most astute detective retracing Maitland route from his office would be hard put to spot his car, shielded by the sea of grass, Maitland loosened his trousers and inspected his injured thigh. The joint had stiffened, and the heavy bruising and broken blood vessels gleamed through the overlay of oil and dirt. Nursing his injured mouth, he drank the last of the tacky water in the windshield reservoir."

Jessica Swoboda  19:05

Yeah, there's so much in this passage that I find really interesting. And it feels very methodical as well. He's going through, okay, how might I be found? Here are the reasons why I might not immediately be found. And then it ends with him drinking from a car part, which is... I find so interesting. But yeah, why did you select this passage?

Joanne McNeil  19:26

In some ways, I selected it because it's, like, the quickest way to set you up for what he's been doing down there. And like, how real—it is in some ways realistic that he could get trapped, that he has structured his life in such a way that he can escape. He's basically let people down in his life, so much because he is a man of power, he's let down the women in his life so much that they'd know not to expect much from him, even his presence, and it means he can disappear. And so all of this power is kind of like disappeared with him, with his car falling over the rail. And I like that. Sometimes he can be a little too expository, and this is more of like a light touch of analysis for you that—I mean, maybe someone else can read this and think, okay, that's like telling you exactly what to think. But to me, having read a lot of Ballard where he is just like sometimes telling you exactly what to think, here, this feels like a very light touch of showing you, okay, he's been kind of setting himself up for some kind of collapse. And it's also just—there are so many themes he gets into in his work broadly, but to me, one of the things he does incredibly well is depict that shock of when everything has been taken away, the shock that he experienced in his life. He goes to internment camp, the shock of, he experienced the stability of a marriage, it's gone. He shows you that you might think you're just going for an ordinary drive. What makes you so sure you're going to get to the other side? There are so many things that maybe they're unlikely, but they can happen, and when that happens, what are you left with? And so I like that passage. I just kind of, to be honest, I kind of looked at the book and looked at like, where I had a bunch of underlines, and was like, oh, okay, that's actually a place where it gives you much of the story, right in those very short few lines. 

Zach Fine  21:34

And could we talk a little bit about the language and the sentences? I'm curious, as a writer, if there's anything exemplary about Ballard here in the prose that attracts you or repels you in the passage. 

Joanne McNeil  21:48

I would say what always kind of—as now as a writer myself, because when I encountered him, I was about to become a writer, but I wasn't myself a writer. As a writer myself, I feel like he balances two kind of modes, of critical thinking and then also really abstract dreaminess. And it's a weird kind of balance that I myself really try too in my own writing. Like, I want to be both a critic and the dreamer. And right here in this passage, he's given you the social criticism and also, okay, he's drinking water from the reservoir. Come on, that's like, very visual, very out there. And also funny. He would tell people he was laughing through various books he read, wrote, and some of his books it might be a little bit funny to think, like, oh, he was laughing when he wrote that? But this one, it's clear this is a very funny book. So he's got his synthesizing criticism, abstractness and and humor and like, a real concise like, like, I said, it's funny to me how much you can stuff in just this very small passage. And there are other parts that I could have picked that are, like, very vivid descriptions. The way he uses technical language, I really admire that. I have to say, like, I've read this book several times, and I always kind of have trouble envisioning exactly. I don't think it's an etch-a-sketch to him, but I do have sometimes some trouble being like, okay, where is he? Like, how big is this island? There's a few spaces that you can visualize, because Maitland makes his way up to the highway from there. But there are a few times where we're like, uh, okay. Or even just like, the occurrence of like, how is there a cinema down there? Okay, they're like, deep in this subterranean from the point of view of a driver. But actually, this was solid ground. This was like a neighborhood before the highways came in. 

Zach Fine  24:04

Have you seen any of the blogs online of people trying to locate it in London? You know, they've tried to find the intersection. 

Joanne McNeil  24:10

Yeah, there is. I would love to actually go there myself at some point. I should, when I'm in London, I should try to drive out there, that way, because it's clearly a massive intersection. I think it was like the Ballardian, this really wonderful blog that was active when I was, like, in my super Ballard fan mode in the aughts that had a lot of really deep criticism like that, which should go into landscapes and go into, like, the real, I mean, at the time people would call psychogeography.

Jessica Swoboda  24:51

I wonder, like, you're just talking about how you can't create this etch-a-sketch of the island or where he is. And I wonder if there's, like, this sense where the island isn't just located to this one space, but it's something more like, it's something more encompassing, something he just inhabits in his everyday life. Because there's this line where Jen says to him, you were on the island long before you crashed here. And so yeah, what are we to make then of what this island is? What is it? Where is it located? Why? Why might she phrase or describe it in that way?

Joanne McNeil  25:26

I mean, it really is this life that he's built for himself. And I think reading it this time around, I was a little bit more aware of his relationships with the two women and how blunt Ballard is at certain times about how much Maitland's wife does not like him, even though they're still married. And then also, you have to imagine that Helen has also fallen into this routine that like, at this point they're not in this kind of like secret relationship with all the excitement at this point, she's just like another person in his orbit who is, these days of the week he sees her, and then, you know, and it feels like he's just set up all these routines. Even his administrative assistant knows not to expect much from him. That there's a line about how he has in the past just gone off to America on a holiday and not even told his secretary, so, like people at work just know that he calls the shots, and that he's created this life of ultimate control. Everything revolves around him, and it almost feeds into, like, why he's so useless at finding a way out that, like, a basic kind of, the basic instincts he mentions wanting to hail down a driver, and he says, they're all going too fast. But he doesn't just go up to the highway and wait for somebody. He's mostly just trying all these nutty little ways. And he's kind of going through in his mind what's going to work, what's not going to work. But I think if this happened to most people—I mean, maybe this is my take on it, but if it happened to me, I think I'd probably try to make it up to somewhere a driver could see me and just like, keep waving until I hitch a ride with somebody, and, you know, through because he ends up there so long maroons on this island, on the concrete Island, and I keep using it as like the island, even though it is a patch of land, it's not literally an island, but it's nice to call it the island. He ends up there so long that his clothes are tattered, and after a few days, he's eating basically the food that people throw out their window while driving past, so he's like, eating scraps of food, he's convinced that everybody is just going to think he's an unhoused person who's probably mentally unwell, and it's like, he's basically just gone through all the reasons that just a pretty ordinary way of escape would be the best way. And it's funny because even at the end, there is a character at the end who does get out exactly so, you know, there is a way to escape exactly the way he is convinced that the young woman has been... if it's okay to give a spoiler on this talk, just so people know this is a bit of a spoiler somewhere. So Jane, who's the young woman squatting in the cinema, he is convinced throughout the ending of the second half of the book, that she has some like secret pathway out of this area, he's just gotten in his mind that she knows some secret pathway, and he can go there, he'll just follow her. But then at the end of the book, she just, like, goes up the ramp and hails a driver, and that's how she gets out of there every day.

Jessica Swoboda  29:18

And he's like, oh, there's no secret way. But then he's like, oh, I'm just gonna do that immediately. He's like, no, let me go walk around some more. Let me go kind of hang out for a bit longer. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, like, he's acting so counterintuitively to what, like, your everyday person would do. And I guess that  like, adds to the surrealist component of things. 

Joanne McNeil  29:44

Yeah, like one element I think is very interesting in this book is, like Ballard would often say that he didn't like writing characters with children, because he kept his own being a single father life so segmented from his writing life. And it was something that he's very proud, very, very loving, committed father, but like, he kept it so separate from his life. And most of his characters do not have children, the main characters, but Robert does have a son, and his son is so, it's just an afterthought throughout this book. It's like David, his son, David, is eight years old, and from the beginning, one of his commitments that he fails at is like he's supposed to pick his son up from school, but he phrases it in such a way that it sounds like he's been late a few times. And David has come to expect that his dad is not always going to be able to pick him up from school. And it's David. His thoughts do gravitate to his wife and to Helen, who he's having an affair with, but his thoughts do not. He doesn't think much of David at all, and at one point, this, to me, is like one of the those funny observations where it's clear Ballard knows what he's doing with this character. He talks about a photo of a young man on his desk at work, and that photo is not even of David. It's of Robert Maitland as a seven year old. It's a photo of himself as a boy. He doesn't even have a photo of his son on his desk. It's just one of those details that is almost mean, but also deliciously mean, and he doesn't do that a lot in his character. So I really loved that kind of character development here.

Zach Fine  30:15

At the risk of demystifying the novel or, like, kind of trying to read it in a clear cut way, I'm curious what you think the main feed of social criticism is running through it. Like, not to say that there's a one to one between the island and some, you know, particular corporation, or whatever it is, but like, what do you think the main criticism of the book is about life in the 1970s in the U.K.? 

Joanne McNeil  31:57

That is a great question because you could put that to, like all of Ballard's work that, like—Uh, okay, so the way he always explained himself as a social critic is, like, his favorite phrase to use was that he's the guy holding a sign, "dangerous turns ahead," and that's his role as a as a novelist, that he's providing these warnings. And then if you kind of dig a little bit deeper in his work, and with, like, the most admiration possible, I say this, you're left to wonder, okay, what exactly are you warning us about? Because his politics do not map very neatly anywhere. He would say he was a libertarian, which, I mean, means its own kind of thing in the Seventies and Eighties, he would in some interviews sound very critical of Thatcher. But then, like, another interview would be like, oh, I love Thatcher. Like, no, you don't, like, there's nothing your books that suggests that you have any respect for Margaret Thatcher, but okay, like, it's just he's clearly kind of like a delighting in ambiguity. So to me as the reader, because Ballard himself being quite the—I would say that's the element that, like people who do, like me, read through all of his books, you were reading because, like, he is almost tantalizing you with this ultimate secret of the world where his scope is so broad, the systems, and it's like the systems that he's looking at and the technologies, but then he never quite gives you this ultimate answer. And I would say the book, to me, what I take from it is that alienation, that alienation that has been built. You know, these highways have been built over a neighborhood, that neighborhood is now nothing, and it's like this highway will one day be nothing. And you can build and build, and in some ways, you're just going to continue to... the individual is just further and further alienated from their true nature, which in this, in Robert Maitland's case, is kind of like a super-individualistic nature. I would say he's not someone who's going to a world of generosity and caring. He's going to a place of ultra-individualism, to the point of complete isolation. But yeah, I always think it's funny how Ballard is, in some ways, someone who stands alone as a writer. He was never quite enmeshed in the science fiction world, and later on he never became like this—people don't talk about him like a systems novelist, like he's never really put in conversation with Pynchon or DeLillo. It's clear he's doing something not of like this analysis of systems, necessarily, in the fiction. It's a little more eternal. It's a little bit more the alienation itself that he's going through. But there's really no one who writes this way, although many, I think, try.

Jessica Swoboda  35:19

We've spent a lot of time talking about Maitland, and I'm but I'm really fascinated by Proctor and Jane as well. What do you make of them as characters and like their place in the novel? I will say, the one detail about Proctor that I think, and maybe Ballard did this intentionally, but that stuck out to me was his scarred hands is like a detail that I kept seeing throughout. And I don't know if that's just me or if anyone else, Zach or you Joanne, noticed it, but yeah, I guess I'm just wondering, what do you make of these characters and their place in the novel, and Maitland's relationship to them as well? Because it takes a turn three-fourths through the novel. 

Joanne McNeil  36:00

Yeah, because it feels like he kind of borrowed the scaffolding of Robinson Crusoe, and then he borrows the scaffolding of The Tempest. And it doesn't like, it doesn't feel like he's trying to rewrite it necessarily. He's not like, necessarily committed. It's more like just this prompt to get going and as characters they are—I have in some readings, this is the part where I get bored. In my first readings of this book, that would be the part where I'm like, okay, great setup, not so great ending, not so great second half. But this time around, I did appreciate that you see that Maitland hasn't necessarily gone through a transformation, and to me, they do still serve as a function of the other characters who aren't seen in scenes with Maitland, that they are still revolving around him. But there is something of like that people can inhabit this space. And in the case of Jane, the young woman, it seems like she has a posh background, has hinted at either traumas or bad experiences. It seems she was married quite young and had a miscarriage, and just like all these experiences that are hinted at, but at this point, she's 20 years old, and in this space, clearly, like the two men, does not want company, and that Proctor, in some ways, is ideal company for her, that he is not a man who has any expectations from her in terms of how she is physically a quite attractive young woman. Proctor, on the other hand, he's still, I'll admit I still a little bit unsure of if there is something more that Ballard is doing with him, that this is like a real ultimately, he's presented first as kind of violent, but you later see is quite kind and trusting. And those later scenes are... Proctor is legitimately manipulated and abused by Maitland. Jane is also manipulated and abused, but she is aware that it is happening, and she, in some ways, almost like, cuts off the possibility of him by—it's a little bit unusual, like when she has sex with Robert, that she asks for five quid. And, like, this big to-do about, like, Oh, she wants five quid from him. So she can, kind of like, continue to tell herself she doesn't want it, or she doesn't want him to be able to take it from her. There's some kind of sense of a power move that's still not an act of power. And what's funny to me about that chapter is it ends with Maitland thinking how much he wishes he could just give money to his wife and Dr Helen and also his mother, who doesn't come up much, and then it's just like, wait. So you want to be able to just pay off all the women in your life so that they will no longer expect anything from it. That, to me, is like the other really, like, incredibly funny, where he has this opportunity to display a shred of kindness and and even sincere gratitude, and he just goes to this place of of continually putting people in an orbit around him. So he maintains as this, this island.

Zach Fine  39:58

So your novel, Wrong Way, was published in 2023, almost fifty years after Ballard's, and they're both, in some ways, novels about automobiles, about cars. But beyond that, I'm curious how Ballard's work, and Concrete Island in particular, shaped your own thinking as you were writing Wrong Way.

Joanne McNeil  40:23

You know, he's, in my mind, he's one of the best influences you can have, because you will never be able to write like him. I knew for as much as I've read his work, I just don't have that way of that finesse of mechanical language and and medical language. I think the humor, I feel like there's my humor is probably formed a lot by reading Ballard. But in in some ways, what I wanted to do with Wrong Way was it is another very character-driven book that might, from the outside, look like a science-fiction book, and it's another book that might fall into the science-fiction genre, while also being ultimately about technologies that exist now. And I think, like I said before, I love being able to blend more abstract, dreamy passages with in my case, more like tech criticism, and make it so that they blend together more fluidly. And I try for this in my nonfiction too. And I think I would say that reading Ballard though, that this was an author who really shaped me, that I loved books as a teenager, but when I read Super-Cannes, it was something else for me. It felt like new prescription glasses that all of a sudden, these things that I had felt around me, I could see them—and again, like without the answers, just a sense of a sensitivity to ruin, to systems that are designed for perfection but will fail, a sensitivity to the drive to power in a technical or business sense, that, like, I had been reading these books, so I knew that if someone wants to lead it, you know, in it, in a Ballard novel, if someone wants to be the head of a tech company, he's got to be a psychopath. He's a pervert. So it's like, it didn't come as some shock to me, that, like, that's basically what's what we're seeing out of Silicon Valley today,

Jessica Swoboda  42:46

In your book, and then just in all your work in general, you explore a lot the intersection of labor and technology. And I'm wondering what interests you so much about the two and the intersection of the two? 

Joanne McNeil  42:58

That's a great question, because I don't have, like, an immediate answer. I mean, I think I strive to depict class in a very immediate way. I would say, I think another thing that I feel I learned from Ballard is kind of like the difference between being blunt and being obvious. So I like being blunt about class. And it's funny how blunt you can be about class, and then also misread. And I think with Wrong Way in particular, I set out to show—it's about a woman who's 48, she has become kind of this abstracted Lyft driver, and it was very important to me, when I talked about this book, to make sure that people understood this is not a story of startup life. There is a very different experience if you are a 28-year-old who graduated from Stanford and have a job as a marketing assistant at Lyft headquarters in San Francisco. You have a very different life than a 48-year-old who is a Lyft driver. And to me, this is like an incredibly blunt and obvious point, but somehow, in the realm of fiction, sometimes that does get lost. And I know I have kind of struggled for for words. At some point, I would love to have better words, because it would be nice to be able to explain my fiction better. But I get really frustrated with how you, in the typical contemporary novel published in New York, look at the jacket copy, and it's always a story of class. And I don't ever feel like there are books about class in the way that I write about class, or the way that Ballard writes about class, that in Ballard's fiction, he is showing not just—he doesn't really bother with working-class depictions necessarily. That's not what interests him. He is interested in middle-class oblivion, the blinkered state you're in of comfort and convenience. And he's interested in that, because it can be taken away. But he's also interested in, like, what drives might that inspire—can you be so comfortable that you will create chaos? And these are questions that I think I've continued, that I learned from. And I think in many ways, you can look at Wrong Way as like a working-class narrative, but I think a very strong element of this book is this oblivious middle class, not this ultimate billionaire class, but like the more college-educated people who might think of themselves as themselves just trying to get by in Greater Boston, who have figured out a way to live without knowledge of the deprivations quite close to them.

Jessica Swoboda  46:00

Well, Joanne, thank you so much for joining us again. It's been a really fun conversation. So thank you.

Joanne McNeil  46:06

Oh, this is great. I love the podcast. I'm so happy to be here. 

Zach Fine  46:10

Thanks so much, Joanne, we appreciate it.

Jessica Swoboda  46:19

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Selected Novels. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast and contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.