Such questions are interesting but idle. The more pressing issue is what kind of monster Jim has turned out to be. A compulsive womanizer, Jim jumps the bones of virtually every female who crosses his field of vision in a series of couplings Mr. Ballard describes with a somewhat quizzical, almost clinical specificity. In some of these pairings there are hints of affection or even the possibility of love, but on other occasions Jim is remote, all the more impersonal for the details he adduces, and his exertions have about the same moral weight as those of a strenuous game of handball. The outcome, though, is darker, indeed so bleak and difficult as to require the fictional guise and even to support the kind of heightened scrutiny that invites.
Scar tissue endures.
In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. . . . Violence and pornography provided a kit of desperate measures that might give some meaning both to Miriam's death and to the unnumbered victims of the war in China. The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade. A candy bar the size of a small car lay in the sun, its papier-mache wrapper peeling from the wooden frame. Beside it were a detergent pack my own height, its plywood sheeting warped by the rain and sun, and a fibreglass ketchup bottle painted in red enamel.