“A Fugue for Dead Malls”: My Review
I’m sitting with Alex in a diner in Maplewood, New Jersey. I am on my Seinfeld shit. Alex and I often have metatextual discussions in which we relate our lives and experiences to those of the characters on Seinfeld. This can sometimes be off-putting for people who don’t know us very well; we take pride in being able to give honest, metatextual, readings of ourselves. At this very moment, in the diner, I am taking on the role of George Costanza. I’m sure if you asked Alex, he would say that he was George Costanza (and perhaps he is in most contexts). But when we are together, I strongly believe that he takes on the role of Jerry while I maintain my role as George. Except when our friend Drew is involved, then he takes on the role of Jerry, while George falls to Alex, and Kramer falls to me. I have never told Alex this. Perhaps it is too honest a glance into my perception of our friendship.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, I would say we are about an hour into our dinner when Alex tells me he got a story published in a literary magazine for the first time. This may seem like the kind of news that would be front-loaded in a conversation, but Alex and I had to spend that time discussing random bullshit and non sequiturs that only we find funny. Important life news is typically saved for the end, when we remember that our parents will invariably ask about “how [they] are doing” and we want to ensure we have something to report. I left the diner that night with a promise to read the story and get back to him. Finally, a month later, I got back to him.
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“A Fugue for Dead Malls” is formally very interesting to me. It is a series of pithy sentences punctuated by what I can only describe as old-timey images (see above). The story centers around an unnamed narrator and his friend Jane taking a trip to an open, but decaying, mall. It’s not explicit that our first-person narrator is an insert for the author, but, knowing him like I do, I believe there are some autobiographical elements here. As our characters enter the mall, we see our narrator experience alienation tied to his childhood dislike of malls. In one of my favorite stylistic flourishes, Alex pairs a line about a “gaggle of teens” with a picture of children pointing at some unseen object. What are they pointing at? Are they pointing at him? Or just some toy they see in the shop window? Both scenarios are alienating to our main character.
At the same time, the narrator is experiencing an “eerie feeling” that he believes is something more than childhood anxieties. They stop at a calendar store where the narrator makes a joke that I immediately got but that his companion did not. They then venture into the darkest recesses of the mall, and that uneasy feeling comes over our main character again. He refuses to turn and run. He has come this far, and will conquer the mall once and for all.
What he finds at the end of this hallway is an abandoned Rainforest Cafe. Pressing his face to the glass, he discovers inside a dusty nine-foot-tall gorilla. His childhood memories of this place come rushing back, and he remembers fondly a time before alienation and before the complications that life brings. As we age things we lose our wide-eyed sense of wonder, and struggle to see potential in the minutiae of everyday life. In this dusty gorilla the narrator gains a new appreciation for malls: not in the conventional way of the gaggle of teens–not through nostalgia or the desire to consume–but through utility and potential. He imagines the future of the mall not as a mall, but as a myriad of other possibilities. The mall is dead, but it’s legacy will live on with the apartments, school, or glade that replace it.
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We’re back in the diner. I’m making a joke about how this summer is going to be the “Summer of Tom.” Alex has no idea how proud I am of him because I haven’t said it out loud. George Costanza wouldn’t say something like that to Jerry, I think, George Costanza would say something like this :
“The sea was angry that day my friends…”
