As a 16-year-old, I worked at the Hollister in my Pittsburgh suburb’s nice but ordinary mall. It was a job that required me to wear the brand’s clothing — T-shirts advertising the beaches of La Jolla or Newport in California, a state I had not yet visited, and flip-flops year-round, even when there were inches of snow outside. My manager, who couldn’t have been older than 22, relentlessly shoplifted the store’s merchandise. It was a cool job that made a gawky, boyfriend-less teenager cooler by proximity.
I realized even then how incongruous a place it was. I preferred the Sunday morning shift, when I could have the mall to myself — everyone else was at church — and load up the store’s jukebox with Beck and Led Zeppelin while thinking dramatic teenage thoughts about loneliness. Which makes me a little bit like Kate Black.
“When I go to the mall, I usually want to leave right away,” Black writes in “Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning,” a memoir and examination of the history of mall culture. “When I go to the mall, I feel like I’m on the tip of becoming myself.”
Black’s title is not just a reference to the shopping industrial complex; it’s also a literal place. The author grew up near West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which was, until 2004, the world’s biggest mall. (That title is now held by the South China Mall, Iran Mall or Dubai Mall, depending on whether we’re measuring by gross or leasable square footage, and whether construction in progress is counted.) The big mall of Black’s childhood memories is an over-the-top attraction: indoor roller coasters, a massive wave pool, an aquarium with penguins and dolphins, and a reproduction of one of Christopher Columbus’s vessels, in addition to the requisite Abercrombie, Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.
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But her mall — like most malls, these days — isn’t what it used to be. Online shopping has killed foot traffic; department store anchors have gone bankrupt. It has shrunk in our cultural imagination, too: “Mall fashion” is a derisive term for uncreative basics. Teenagers don’t hang out there as much as they used to. Online nostalgia videos document empty, dead malls, a genre that Black calls a touchstone of “capital-letters Late Capitalism.”
An examination of adolescence and death and consumption and spectacle, “Big Mall” ponders why the mall makes us feel good, and bad. Much of the book is introspective; some of it looks outward at the cultural forces that spread this particular facet of American commerce across the globe. The motto “no ethical consumption under capitalism” resonates throughout.
Black threads her memories through the history of mall architecture and Canadian history, including the Albertan oil industry, the socioeconomic conditions that created youth culture, and the tragedies that befell people who have died in the West Edmonton Mall and others, from roller coaster accidents, suicide, Black Friday trampling incidents, or abduction and murder. “When a teenage girl dies in a mall, she dies in a place explicitly designed for her becoming,” Black writes. “This is either the greatest betrayal or a machine merely revealing its design.”
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West Edmonton’s dolphins — Mavis, Howard, Maria and Gary, named after the mall’s managerial staff — fare no better, leading lonely, desperate lives in a too-small tank. Keeping a caged animal in a mall, Black says, is as icky as it gets: “To see it displayed so overtly puts a finer point to late-capitalism distress.” The chapter on mall animals’ lives, which includes Ivan, a gorilla who lived for 27 years in a Tacoma, Wash., shopping center, lands still more melancholically than the portions about human deaths.
Beneath the little shocks of these losses, there is the thrumming current of a broader mourning, the longing for a mall that was interesting. All those wacky attractions at West Edmonton Mall are pretty unusual these days. The three biggest malls in North America, one of which is West Edmonton, are owned by the same corporation. All malls are the same now — the same look, even the same smell — and they share a slippery, liminal texture.
Last month, I traveled to Singapore with a friend. One day, we went to the megamalls of Orchard Road — known worldwide as a shopping paradise — hoping to bring home some Singaporean style. But mall fashion has become so globalized and homogenized that I was naively disappointed to see so many of the same stores from everywhere else, such as Coach and Lululemon. The clothes at the homegrown Singaporean brands looked as if they could have been from anywhere. “The history of the mall,” Black writes, “is a mirror.”
The feeling of dissociation that malls can produce in us is called the “Gruen transfer,” named after the mid-20th-century mall design pioneer Victor Gruen. Seventy years ago, he broke ground for Southdale Center in Edina, Minn., and most malls are informed by its design — multiple levels of stores facing a climate-controlled, enclosed central courtyard — to this day. The Gruen transfer is not an unpleasant feeling. It makes us unmoored but also unbound. We lose ourselves in the promises of belonging-through-consumption that the mall makes — and this makes us spend money, which is the whole point.
Late in the book, Black admits that hearing other people talk about the death of their beloved childhood malls “is about as interesting as hearing another person describe their dreams.” The West Edmonton Mall isn’t dead, but it isn’t what it once was, and there doesn’t seem to be much self-awareness that Black, herself, has been describing her dream to us. She conveys a well-defined sense of place for her mall, but she left me wanting to see how the moods that defined her experiences there would be applied in Singapore or Dubai, or the briefly mentioned American Dream mall — it has an indoor ski slope and a Ferris wheel — in New Jersey.
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Gruen, who made and was made by the mall, came to hate his legacy. He had wanted malls to become town squares, surrounded by libraries and parks and schools. Instead, they became islands surrounded by concrete. He was shocked by “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking,” he said later in life.
Black’s book produces a Gruen transfer of its own — a nifty trick. Will reading it make you hate malls, or enjoy them on a whole new level? Yes and yes, a disorienting feeling. Finishing the slim book feels like stumbling out of the air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, blinking, into harsh and warm sun.
Big Mall
Shopping for Meaning
By Kate Black
Coach House. 173 pp. $18.95
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