It seems inevitable with the rash of incidents involving gunmen shooting up a public place, be it a post office or a school, that someone would write a novel about it. Eric Bogosian, with his first novel, “Mall,” takes on this sticky subject but tries to infuse a little humor into the situation.
Not a good idea.
You would think that a plot yanked from those kinds of headlines would either be a satire or a pot-boiler thriller, but Bogosian chooses to take the middle ground between them and comes up with a sticky, superficial mess.
The story revolves around five obsessive characters who collide at a local suburban mall: Mal, the speed freak who kills his mother, sets his house on fire and travels to the most populated place he can find with a bag of automatic weapons in tow; Danny, a successful middle-age businessman with a frigid wife and a penchant for Sears lingerie catalogs; Jeff, a wannabe suburban Rastafarian who embarks on a disastrous acid trip; Donna, a hungry, oversexed housewife with a “dead trout” for a husband and a flair for exhibitionism; and Michel, a Haitian immigrant who takes his job as a mall security guard to the extreme in an attempt to block out the pain of his wife’s death.
Bogosian tries to manipulate his characters into situations that illustrate the hollow and spiritually empty underside of suburbia but really only succeeds in exposing the shallowness of his characters. He takes the easy road with Mal, who comes off as a one-note lunatic whose motivations for going on his rampage are never really clear (except for the drugs). Jeff and Donna don’t really resonate well as believable denizens of Bogosian’s world, and Michel is a mere skeleton, fleshed out only by a few flashbacks to give the reader any clue why he pursues Mal with such dogged intensity. Danny is the only one who comes off as having any kind of complexity, but that’s only in comparison to the others.
The humor in “Mall” leaves something to be desired, especially after the wake of recent school shootings. A madman’s shooting up a mall is not the most effective stage for comedy of any sort, but Bogosian brushes by this consideration by giving us the most ludicrous situations at the most inopportune times. Look, it’s Danny handcuffed in the back of an abandoned police cruiser as a sociopathic teenager attempts to rape him! Oh my, Jeff is picked up by Donna and carted off to a Best Western, where he proceeds to have a psychedelic freakout during a sweaty intercourse session! It’s moments like these that undermine Bogosian’s attempts to make any real social commentary and reduce his book to the equivalent of an auto accident.
Parts of “Mall” exhibit some flair. Bogosian turns an occasional lyrical phrase and manages to mine a bit of genuine human emotion, but these parts are scattered throughout the book. You would think that the winner of numerous playwright awards could come up with something a little better than this.
While the book isn’t totally irredeemable, Bogosian can’t quite pull off his sweeping critique of suburbia, the media and consumer culture in general. While trying to make his characters’ respective emptiness stand for something, he only succeeds in hollowing out the emotional core of his book.