Trapped, writing, in retail hell
Is a book that takes place in a mall that’s fallen on hard times bad luck or really good timing?
The narrator of “Kill the Mall” spends most of his time sitting alone at his desk, looking out at abandoned shops and working long hours for people he never meets. Around him, he senses, reality is becoming increasingly weird. Has Pasha Malla, one of Canada’s most wildly imaginative writers, become a chronicler of contemporary life?
Well, not quite — “Kill the Mall” was written before the pandemic and first slated for publication last spring, before COVID-19 scuppered so many publishers’ plans. Truth be told, with the decimation of small-business retail since then, any writer who pokes fun at local malls risks flogging a horse that is, if not dead, at least deeply discounted.
But there’s more than one way into a Pasha Malla book. Both “People Park” (2012) and “Fugue States” (2017) — respectively, his sprawling, absurd debut novel and its deceptively “realistic” follow-up — take chances with form, are unsettlingly funny, and tackle a range of themes in unorthodox ways.
So, too, with “Kill the Mall,” whose unnamed narrator is given a residency at a local mall that could be anywhere in North America; there, he is assigned a vacant retail unit in which to live, and tasked with spending half his time making unspecified “work.” The other half is supposed to be spent “engaging the public” — as authors are expected to do nowadays, often through social media.
Alas, the mall has fallen on hard times, so there’s hardly anyone around — apart from the taciturn caretaker, the teenagers working at the food court’s one and only open stall, and a forlorn denimshop salesman who befriends the narrator and then disappears.
Out of a sense of duty, the narrator spends most of his time penning “progress reports” drawn from his uncomfortable encounters and worried observations. At first, they read like hyperbolic marketing copy about malls, and then they reflect his uneasiness with his surroundings.
Poking around behind the scenes, he finds all manner of baffling phenomena: a hidden swimming pool that may be full of ghosts, a white pony wandering through a subterranean corridor, clumps of what appears to be sentient hair, and most disturbingly, an endless proliferation of shuttered shops that prevents him from ever reaching the exit. He starts hatching quixotic plots to overthrow the unseen forces that govern the mall — while trying to evade CCTV.
As trumpeted by the book’s blurbs, Kafka and David Lynch come to mind, it’s a series of windowless, desolate and sickly rooms that seem designed to accommodate some commercial purpose, multiplied ad infinitum to create an inescapable maze from the detritus of capitalism.
The plight of “Kill the Mall”’s narrator, who’s trapped in his own retail hell, makes us think about how late capitalism shapes the way we live, as crystallized by the pandemic — the lack of public space; the mediation of our interactions, through video calls and virtual classrooms, by faceless, data-harvesting corporations; the servile attitude enforced on gig-economy workers; and the risk of alienation when building community, and making art, are considered valuable only when there’s economic profit involved.
Not that Malla ever gets on a soapbox: in this book as in his others, his writing is set apart by the courage of its conviction — his scenarios and stories, however bizarre, are internally consistent and selfsustaining.
He draws us in with humour and intriguing incidents, and leaves readers to decide what it all means. And should the narrator’s unspoolling monologue, and the progress reports that constantly interrupt it, prove frustrating at times, one senses they’re meant to be so.
What is clear is that “Kill the Mall,” issued by the world’s largest publishing conglomerate (Bertelsmann via Penguin Random House), probes mischievously into the complex intersections between art, social relationships and business. It’s the novel as both conceptual art and shaggy-dog story. Your enjoyment will depend on how much you’re prepared to invest in either. Regardless, this isn’t a book you’ll easily forget.
The plight of the narrator makes us think about how late capitalism shapes the way we live, as crystallized by the pandemic