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A review by mrchance
Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton
2.0
The dying mall fascinates me. Buildings lying empty and decayed like concrete whales stranded on asphalt beaches. My hometown had a dead mall and a "new" mall, which is now an old, but still breathing, mall. I've been to bustling malls and malls that feel like dark caverns populated with bargain stores and churches (salvation on a budget). So I was drawn to this book. Billed on the flap as "part memoir and part case study," Shopping Mall is at its best when focusing on the latter, but it is unfortunately, for me, heavy on the former.
This book is in a series called "Object Lessons." I'm unsure if the other books are as self-indulgent as this one, as I haven't read them and don't plan to.
Matthew Newton crafts loving images of a nostalgic past. His final image is a stirring one -- "It is the mall rendered in spare parts pulled from memory, its image flickering like a hologram, threatening to vanish before the future ever arrives." But for me, the memoir portions soon become more about Matthew Newton and less about malls. His personal story is so loosely tied to the concept, it reads like "here are things that happened to me in a shopping mall."
The naval-gazing puts this book in "it was good" territory for me, but the abjectly bad copy-editing lowered my enjoyment of the book further. Does Bloomsbury employ a copy-editor? Do they need freelance help? Take notes: The phrase "wrap his knuckles" creates an entirely different image than the author likely intended. The phrase "standing across from Charles and I" demonstrates that the "Object Lessons" crew needs lessons in objects of prepositions. Other issues include, "Usually its apples, bananas, yogurt, and string cheese on my list." (There is a correct "it's" in the previous sentence, making this one even more baffling.) and Newton's use of the phrase "two-year-old son" three times in five pages, without mentioning any other kids, so this is clearly his ONLY SON why does he have to remind us that he's two years old every other page? Where is the editing?!
Most of these slip-ups I noticed at the end of the book, so a) I must have been skimming the memoir parts in the middle, b) I was grumpy, or c) the copy-editor they did hire gave up around page 100, or they expected the reader to.
There is also a baffling chapter where Newton writes in second-person, addressing the reader, but as if the reader were inside the board game Mall Madness. Even I, as a board game fan and dying mall looky-loo, thought WTF.
When Newton is focused on his subject (the title subject on the book's cover), he draws smart connections between shopping malls, suburban culture, and white anxiety. He also interviews a photographer of dead malls who gives him the best quote in the book: "The things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms." In that sense, the mall, formulated in the 1950s, brought to prominence during the excess of the 1980s, on life support in the 2010s, is a sobering metaphor for America itself.
This book is in a series called "Object Lessons." I'm unsure if the other books are as self-indulgent as this one, as I haven't read them and don't plan to.
Matthew Newton crafts loving images of a nostalgic past. His final image is a stirring one -- "It is the mall rendered in spare parts pulled from memory, its image flickering like a hologram, threatening to vanish before the future ever arrives." But for me, the memoir portions soon become more about Matthew Newton and less about malls. His personal story is so loosely tied to the concept, it reads like "here are things that happened to me in a shopping mall."
The naval-gazing puts this book in "it was good" territory for me, but the abjectly bad copy-editing lowered my enjoyment of the book further. Does Bloomsbury employ a copy-editor? Do they need freelance help? Take notes: The phrase "wrap his knuckles" creates an entirely different image than the author likely intended. The phrase "standing across from Charles and I" demonstrates that the "Object Lessons" crew needs lessons in objects of prepositions. Other issues include, "Usually its apples, bananas, yogurt, and string cheese on my list." (There is a correct "it's" in the previous sentence, making this one even more baffling.) and Newton's use of the phrase "two-year-old son" three times in five pages, without mentioning any other kids, so this is clearly his ONLY SON why does he have to remind us that he's two years old every other page? Where is the editing?!
Most of these slip-ups I noticed at the end of the book, so a) I must have been skimming the memoir parts in the middle, b) I was grumpy, or c) the copy-editor they did hire gave up around page 100, or they expected the reader to.
There is also a baffling chapter where Newton writes in second-person, addressing the reader, but as if the reader were inside the board game Mall Madness. Even I, as a board game fan and dying mall looky-loo, thought WTF.
When Newton is focused on his subject (the title subject on the book's cover), he draws smart connections between shopping malls, suburban culture, and white anxiety. He also interviews a photographer of dead malls who gives him the best quote in the book: "The things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms." In that sense, the mall, formulated in the 1950s, brought to prominence during the excess of the 1980s, on life support in the 2010s, is a sobering metaphor for America itself.