It is hard to picture the late Portuguese master José Saramago at the mall, or the very British J.G. Ballard for that matter. Yet both writers alighted briefly on that synthetic terrain and made it their own; Saramago in his 2000 novel “The Cave,” which conjured up a vampire-like shopping complex that sucks life out of the surrounding countryside, and Ballard in his final work, “Kingdom Come” (2006), set in the English midlands, which revolved around a vast Metro-Centre patrolled by fascist gangs. Less apocalyptically, one of the most memorable scenes in Kate Atkinson’s work is that of the protagonist in “Started Early, Took My Dog” (2010), facing her workday at the end of her tether: “Tracy caught sight of herself in the plate glass of Ryman’s, saw the wild-eyed look of a woman falling over the edge . . . She could hear a child crying somewhere—part of the soundtrack of shopping malls the world over.” As settings for and symbols of disintegration it seems that our retail cathedrals will always remain open.
