One of the most quoted scenes in Don DeLillo’s comic novel White Noise involves a shopping spree. The book’s hero, a professor at a small Midwestern college, finds himself facing a midlife crisis and a creeping fear of death. A trip to the local mall revives his spirits.
“I shopped with reckless abandon,” he says. “I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it.”
The more he buys, the more he grows “in value and self-regard.” In the mall, he says, “I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.” He feels as if the building itself enhances his self-understanding. He feels as if he is bathed in sunlight. He keeps catching glimpses of his figure in the mirrors running up and down the concourse colonnades. He is enchanted by the food, delighted by the live band playing Muzak. The passage ends with a rhetorical flourish, which, typical of DeLillo, is as ironic as it is deadly earnest: “Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction.”
I used to think that this was very funny stuff, describing a real instance of excess in American consumer culture. Now I am not so sure. Certainly DeLillo’s pyrotechnics do not reflect my own experiences at the mall. In fact, I cannot recall a single time in my 28 years of life that I have gone there willingly, let alone enthusiastically. It always feels like an ordeal, a chore, an embarrassment. Part of the problem, I suppose, is a matter of sex. I am a man, after all, and not naturally inclined to enjoy shopping. But the greater part, I suspect, derives from the fact that these days the mall is an unpleasant place to be.
This is not breaking news. The American mall has been dying for nearly two decades, and my whole shopping life has been spent picking over its remains. The first big hit came during the Great Recession, when I was in elementary school. I remember clearing out the Borders in Maryland’s White Flint Mall, a melancholy day—even then I knew that the big bookstores would never return—but I did get a bargain-priced Calvin and Hobbes collection out of the deal. The second hit occurred about a decade on, when the widespread adoption of e-commerce, which had already damaged the ailing brick-and-mortar department stores, dealt many the final blow. I took advantage of that downturn, too: I bought my first (and only) tuxedo at the Macy’s in Tysons Corner, Virginia. And, a few years later, right after my wedding, I bought my first set of lampshades from Lord & Taylor, also in Tysons, on its last day of business. My family still has them, though my wife wishes we didn’t.
I think it is safe to say that the target of DeLillo’s satire no longer exists, even in its mildest form. There were about 25,000 malls in the United States in 1986. By some estimates, there are now fewer than 1,000. No one, young or old, drives out to a vast suburban complex surrounded by endless parking lots to indulge in an afternoon of pleasure or, worse, to find meaning. And yet, as the familiar mall has receded, new and even stranger versions have replaced it.
These days the American mall comes in two varieties. The first presents the well-known scene of decay. Pot-holed parking lots, seasonal pop-ups, downmarket lingerie shops, cellphone service centers, and, improbably, megachurches—these are the marks of a mall past its prime. Some are propped up by one anchor tenant, usually a movie theater or a department store, which hangs on in a much diminished state. Almost always they are located in the out-of-the-way suburbs of large cities or, more depressingly, in cities that were once large enough to support a mall, but now no longer are. When these malls finally do expire, their remains are not pretty. Vacant malls sell at an average of 43 percent below their acquisition price. And the empty spaces are only growing more numerous: Between 2017 and 2022, about 40 malls shuttered per year. Many simply rot. Even teenagers don’t hang out at closed malls.
The second form of the mall presents the opposite picture. It is constituted along the lines of Dubai, the city in the United Arab Emirates that is functionally a massive retail extravaganza. These new malls don’t just sell things. And they aren’t like town centers, which in one densely packed space combine the pleasures of suburban housing with those of the strip mall. No, these new malls are cities unto themselves. They are glass and steel palaces, marbled temples, earthbound starships where you go for a luxury experience. And they are not just surviving; they are thriving. A recent report in The Financial Times found that while the standard, decaying mall pulls on average less than $400 per square foot in annual sales, the new luxury malls can bring in more than $1,000. The paper also reported that of the 900-odd shopping malls in the United States, the top 100 money-makers represent about half of the sector’s asset value. Meanwhile, the bottom 350 make up less than 10 percent. And the value of those on the losing end of this equation shrinks daily. As the new mall increases, the old mall decreases.
In some cases, the new malls are just refurbished versions of the old ones. Tysons Corner, my childhood mall, is one of the most famous examples. When I was a kid, it was a standard suburban mall affair: There was a movie theater, a Rainforest Cafe, the usual assortment of department stores. And when every other mall in America took the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the rise of Amazon, it also suffered. The Rainforest Cafe, peace be upon it, is long gone.
But in the past decade or so, Tysons has reinvented itself as a mega-mall. It is now a series of interconnected pavilions, with multiple food courts, open-air decks where you can play bocce or giant games of Connect Four, and locations of pretty much every luxury brand in America. Allen Edmonds, Burberry, Cartier, Kate Spade—if you want to outfit yourself with the accoutrements of the upper middle class, you can find them at Tysons. And yet the mall is accessible to all. For the rich, the Ritz Carlton and a suite of penthouses are directly connected to the promenades. For everyone else, there are skyscraper parking garages and a metro line which runs from the city all the way out to Dulles Airport. You could live your whole life there without ever feeling the need to leave.
Still, when I visit Tysons Corner these days, I feel just as depressed as in a dying mall in Michigan or Ohio. Though the American mall has bifurcated into winners and losers, both versions feel profoundly empty. The new mall covers may cover itself in glitz, but leaving that aside, what really differentiates it from the old one? Its pretensions to glamour are weak, unconvincing. It’s still just a jumble of stores. No amount of nostalgia, no revamped experience can make it anything more.
In any case, Tysons Corner keeps growing. Although it sits on unincorporated land, the county brands it as “America’s next great city.” By 2050, it hopes that Tysons becomes a “walkable, green urban center,” home to more than 100,000 people and double as many jobs. The goal is to make the new mall a “24-hour urban center where people live, work and play.”
I fully expect this to happen. I anticipate it. Sometimes I wonder how much has really changed since the days of White Noise. All the new American mall needs now is another DeLillo to chronicle its progress.
