Scott Bradfield
Nobody ever hated the contemporary world with as much intensity and conviction as J. G. Ballard. In five decades of unforgiving literary production, he drowned it, scorched it, flayed it with whirlwinds, deluged it with Martian sand, even transformed it into a crystalline jungle populated by jewel-skinned crocodiles, people and parrots. His characters have been sodomized in car crashes, driven crazy by scientific researchers, hounded by billboards and forced to observe atrocities looping endlessly on movie screens until even Zapruder’s exploding bullets seemed as mundane and predictable as elevator music. For Ballard, who died in 2009 at the age of While there’s a lot we don’t know about Bigfoot, his enthusiasts generally agree that he smells terrible, enjoys leaving footprints where people can find them, and frequents the deepest woods of northern California—a region not coincidentally inhabited by marijuana growers and tall-tale-telling lumberjacks. Primitive, hairy, big-buttocked, and benign (except when he kidnaps local women and takes them home to meet the parents), Bigfoot represents an all-natural alternative to megamalls, the Internet, and TV. Oh, and another thing—after thousands of purported sightings, there’s still not a single piece of evidence that this wise, benevolent naturist actually exists. Perhaps this is because Ronan Bennett’s fifth novel, Zugzwang, is populated by double agents, doppelgängers, counterpropagandists, agents provocateurs, and assassination conspirators so numerous and mutually entangled that you can’t tell them apart without two scorecards—one for their real identities, another for their false ones. The protagonist, Otto Spethmann (Nabokovian punsters, take note), is a Freudian psychoanalyst accustomed to dealing in such dualities. The son of a Jewish baker in prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg, he has learned to sweep Yiddish under the rug, live in a wealthier neighborhood, and eat fluffier bread. He has also developed a sixth sense for digging into his patients’ murky dreams This probably isn’t a good time to fall in love with the English. Their economy—subject to an even more inflated property market than ours—is poised for a fall. Their boozy, clever, and always-for-hire Hitchens-style newspaper hacks are starting to wear thin. And with just about the worst diet in the EU and an unquenchable thirst for our trashiest cultural exports (from Bret Easton Ellis to Desperate Housewives), it’s not always easy telling them apart from, well, us.