AUTHOR SEARCHES FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE AT THE MALL
Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning
Kate Black | Coach House $23.95 | 173pp
Back when I taught English 112, a superannuated composition course at UBC, my syllabus of readings often featured David Guterson's Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured.
Subtitled One Week at the Mall of America, the essay examines the megamall phenomenon, which Guterson condemns as a clock-less, windowless maze, a “vastly profitable yet socially enervated” enclosure where “we discover ourselves thoroughly lost among strangers in a marketplace intentionally designed to serve no community needs.”
As rhetoric goes, Guterson's essay is a tour de force.
Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning, Kate Black's first book, initially drew me because I was curious to know the case someone else might make against — or for — malls. Though death of the mall headlines have appeared sporadically for years, current multi-billion dollar Vancouver area expansions like Oakridge and Brentwood suggest the final nail isn't in the coffin yet.
A transplanted Albertan who resides in Vancouver, Black doesn't refer to Guterson in her otherwise capably researched book, nor does she discuss local mall revitalizations. She grew up near West Edmonton Mall and her familiarity with — and ambivalence about — that tourist magnet commands her attention.
Big Mall does survey the short history of malls, beginning with Victor Gruen, who envisioned “restful, even life-affirming” shopping centres — the first of which, in Edina, Minn., Time magazine called a “pleasure dome with parking.”
Black also touches on common beliefs, such as that malls are a manifestation of “the neoliberal American dream,” and outlines theoretical models, from Rem Koolhaus's “junkspace” — “the detritus of modernity,” Black summarizes — to Marc Augé's concept of non-places: “big, anonymous, transient spaces one moves through without forming meaningful social bonds or identity or engaging with history.”
Less an argument than a wandering series of associations and observations related generally to malls, Black's book approaches its topic lacking a wholly identifiable purpose.
Key chapters: Animals, about land and sea creatures purchased by mall owners as attractions; Youth, which covers malls as destinations for teens; and Accidents, which traces accidental deaths and suicides in malls — approach the subject from unexpected angles.
Still, with comments such as “I find it difficult to pin down one clean thought about visiting the mall,” and “I guess I am interested in understanding why something so stupid has informed my whole life,” Black inserts herself into the narrative as reluctant or uncertain, a writer in pursuit of a thesis.
And with all that sharing, Black's book often comes to operate as a quasi-memoir.
In contrast to the declarative European theorists she cites, Black ornaments Big Mall with her current assortment of interests, from being “being obsessed with watching vlogs” to her “personal hysteria over young people”; and from her dreams about malls and fears: “Most of my top-tier fears involve being hurt of killed in public,” she confides, to her varying anxieties: “I am more attuned to my sense of doom when I return home.”
Further, with a revelation like “You might have noticed this: when I'm spiralling or struggling to make a point, I revert to telling a story about myself,” Black perhaps overshares. She lessens a reader's faith because if she includes yet another anecdote, maybe it serves to indicate her struggle to make a point.
Near the end of Big Mall, Black exclaims, “I belong to a world that I don't like, and I am so complicit in it that I have convinced myself I am incapable of imagining a way out.”
As she ponders “this absurdly miserable bourgeois life” of hers, Big Mall's subtitle — Shopping for Meaning — springs to mind. As Black toiled over her manuscript, maybe malls weren't her actual topic. The book within the book, about the author's quest for meaning in an absurd world, might have been the story she was actually driven to tell.