Prologue Part One: Childhood 1. Eternal Spring 2. Paradise Unknown 3. Spaces Between 4. Shopping is a Feeling Part Two: Adolescence 5. Little Boxes 6. White Denim 7. Mall Madness 8. Neon Hallways 9. Young Love Part Three: Adulthood 10. Homecoming 11. Ghost Malls 12. Utopia Interrupted 13. New Futures Acknowledgments Notes Index
Part memoir and part study of modern life, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the shopping mall and the place it holds in our shared cultural history.
Matthew Newton is Associate Editor at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has been published by the Oxford American, the Atlantic’s CityLab, Forbes, the Rumpus, Guernica, and Spin.
A smart and empathetic look at this waning icon of 20th-century
American consumer culture.
*Pittsburgh City Paper*
Matthew Newton evokes the American mall as symbol of white flight,
aspirational fantasy, and shop-till-you-drop consumerism of the
late 1980s. These are striking tales of suburban isolation in which
Newton reveals life from the employee side of the counter to the
idealistic architects' designs. Above all, he takes an aging
mainstream phenomenon and makes it personal and present.
*Yona Harvey, author of Hemming the Water*
The best passages are those about the actual idea of the mall,
designed by figures such as the Viennese Victor Gruen as a new sort
of civic space that could replace the lost town square in a
post-WWII America reshaped by the rise of suburbia. Newton wraps up
with evocative reflections on instances of violence in shopping
malls and questions about a possible renewal for these spaces, the
popularity of which has flagged since their heyday nearly 30 years
ago. To put it into the vernacular, this book about the mall is at
its best when it’s, like, totally about the mall.
*Publishers Weekly*
Shopping Mall is for anyone who enjoys intelligent, thoughtful
writing. It is surprisingly emotional for a book nominally about an
impersonal space. It’s safe to say this is the very best book I
have ever read about a mall.
*Pittsburgh Magazine*
This series really gets better and better. Newton linking his own
life to the malls he knew growing up, and telling not only his
story, but the fall of a very American institution, is engaging and
profound.
*Jason Diamond, author of Searching for John Hughes*
Newton explores the life of the shopping mall from the first
ground-breaking, in the 1950s, through the chaos and excess of the
1980s to the present, including the death rattle of many malls … In
exploring a personal connection to the mall, he reveals a good bit
about himself. The memoir elements of the book are eloquent and
intimate, detailing his struggles with depression and anxiety. They
also provide a reader with a walking bridge, an avenue for
connection to the mall itself.
*Pittsburgh City Paper*
Newton succeeds in parsing out the different histories of the mall,
from both personal and societal perspectives … The mall, like so
many other taken-for-granted parts of the built environment, holds
memory and nostalgia for millions of suburbanites and shoppers. By
leaving a trail of bittersweet crumbs of nostalgia, Newton spares
the reader from the doom that others have cast over this cultural
change. Rather than focusing on a dystopia of self-absorbed
individuals doing their shopping and finding entertainment online,
we are able to warmly recall the shopping mall and the lifeways in
which it played a central roll [sic], not only for consumption but
also for construction of self and community.
*PopMatters*
Shopping Mall is both history of and paean to the once-ubiquitous
American shopping centers. Essayist Matthew Newton combines his
fond memories of his local mall, outside Pittsburgh, with anecdotes
about the first one built in the United States, the Mall of America
and others, using the specific to pull out the larger story of
late-20th-century suburban commercialism that these edifices
represent … He isn't interested in defending shopping malls, but in
showing how his--and many other people's--lives would be entirely
different without them.
*Shelf Awareness*
Matthew Newton lets you know by Page 10 that he was diagnosed with
obsessive-compulsive disorder as a teenager. These days, he’s a
productive and well-adjusted married man and dad, doing great work
at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and his skills as an inquisitive
writer and thinker are evident from his latest work. But knowing
that part of his makeup helps the reader accept his obsessive
compulsion with shopping malls — particularly Monroeville Mall, the
Valhalla of his childhood — and appreciate the insights that spill
forth in this brief cultural study/memoir … Newton is the person to
write this book because “the shopping mall, more than any other
place, electrified my imagination” as a kid. His readers are
beneficiaries of his experience seeing the mall “as a sacred place
of curiosity and wonder.
*Pittsburgh Quarterly*
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