Though she’s primarily known as a poet, retired mental health counselor Pattie Palmer-Baker was writing her debut novel, Mall, for years before it was published. These days she works from Portland, Oregon, as a poet and an artist, but her novel was inspired by a youth spent going shopping at the local mall.
Those of us old enough to remember when everyone went to the mall instead of shopping online may have fond memories of movie theaters and fun with friends, but Palmer-Baker’s take is a bit more sinister, beginning from when Sara, an unhappy woman, stumbles through an unmarked door in the mall and ends up in another world:
[Sara] continued to run, barely noticing the dim hallway she had entered, until tired and almost breathless, she slowed. Where was she? Why was the light so bad? A few yards away, she made out what seemed to be a doorway dotted with blinking, colored squares of lights. Moving closer, she realized she was having trouble breathing the thickening air. Did she smell smoke? What was happening? Strange, glittering confetti drifted around her. She felt lightheaded, not in an unpleasant way, but more like she felt after a few glasses of champagne. When she reached the end of the hallway, she saw two doors. The one to her left was circular, and the closest one, rectangular. Was she hallucinating or going crazy?
Sara isn’t doing either; she’s accidentally found a portal to another world, the world of “Mall,” where everyone is beautiful, employed, and wealthy. And yet, nothing is as it seems. When Sara finds help integrating into Mall’s society, she’ll have to decide whether her old life is worth going back to in Palmer-Baker’s speculative novel, which Kirkus Reviews calls an “engrossing dystopian tale with well-rounded lead characters.”
Sara, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage and devastated by the news that she cannot have a baby, is lucky to be put in the care of a “Mental Health Practitioner” named Nona. Nona’s role is sort of like a therapist, except in Mall, therapy is more about managing emotions—through some talking but mostly through medication—so that no one ever experiences “negative” feelings.
Mall’s society is so centered on eliminating any kind of negativity that it has rules around anything that might ever make someone feel bad. Everyone must alter their appearance so that it’s pleasing to others. No one is allowed to be in long-term relationships because people fight and break up. Kids don’t live with their parents, so the stresses of family life are avoided and they can all get training to be productive citizens. There are drugs to ameliorate and adjust your emotions. Everyone is assigned a job, so everyone is employed. And if the society has a rigid class structure that includes forced labor? Well, just take a pill and you won’t worry about that so much anymore.
Palmer-Baker, nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her poetry, won the Del Sol Press Prize for First Novel for Mall. And though Palmer-Baker was working on the novel before online shopping had yet to overtake mall culture, she believes the themes “might be even more true now” than before.
While Sara is navigating life in Mall, the other protagonist, Nona, is forced to consider the ways in which her home and her culture might be oppressing her. Nona also struggles with infertility and wishes she could be allowed to build more substantial relationships. As she grows more and more unhappy, she needs to take stronger and stronger drugs to bury her feelings of discontent. Sara starts to wonder whether she’d prefer Mall’s world of artificial bliss to her world of pain and disappointment, but Nona considers whether a little pain and discomfort is what makes happiness worthwhile.
Reading Mall brings to mind contemporary “wellness” culture, with models on Instagram hawking “detox teas” and yoga pants while singing the praises of meditation to get rid of any difficult feelings. Palmer-Baker sees so much of what she wrote about in Mall on her social media feeds, where algorithms are tailored to know exactly who you are and what kinds of things they might try to sell you. “They have me pegged,” she says. “It’s very scary, but it’s also very seductive. People are still comparing themselves to others, finding themselves lacking, thinking that if they just had the right makeup, the right clothes, the right income, they’d be happy.”
Of course, that kind of “happiness” isn’t really happiness. Nona is beautiful, wealthy, and surrounded by consumer goods, but she’s still searching for something meaningful. But as Sara points out, it’s not like the real world is only deep relationships and hard-earned satisfaction. Her husband is cruel to her, she can’t get pregnant, and she’s been bullied for her weight her entire life. Much of what Sara finds in Mall is disturbing, but who wouldn’t find it appealing to have instant, painless procedures to change your appearance if your appearance causes others to be unkind to you?
“We do want easy ways out,” says Palmer-Baker. “I think the happiness that we’re looking for isn’t really happiness, it’s freedom from discomfort and pain.” While writing the novel, Palmer-Baker thought about how so much of our culture is centered around the seductive power of consumerism and conventional beauty standards.
In her career as a counselor, Palmer-Baker worked with girls ages 12 to 14, and she says she was “horrified” by how common eating disorders and self-hatred were in ones so young. She says that really what those compulsions often come down to isn’t so much about looking a certain way as having control over something, anything in your life. Which is an extraordinarily understandable reaction to anxieties and uncertainties. And so the central theme of Mall isn’t about sneering at people who look for happiness in the wrong places. It’s about one simple question: If you could choose between an easy life and close, personal relationships, which would you choose?
Sara and Nona must both make this choice, and when they discover where their true values lie, it may surprise them and readers. Mall is both an incisive critique of superficiality and an immersive work of speculative fiction. Palmer-Baker’s talent as a poet shines through in her fiction as clear, direct prose and succinct worldbuilding. She’s an active artist in the Portland area, and fans can connect with her and her work on her website.
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.