By Audrey Fong
It’s no secret that malls across the nation are going bust. To put into perspective how quickly malls are disappearing, there were about 2,500 malls in the 1980s and now, there are only about 700 left. In ten years, Nick Egelanian, president of retail consulting firm SiteWorks, predicts that there’ll be about 150 malls left.
Yet, the mall continues to be a place for gathering, community, and of course, employment for many. And it’s at the center of Karin Lin-Greenberg’s debut novel, You Are Here, a sensitive portrayal of mall workers in Albany, NY and the way the declining mall both ties them together and impacts their lives.
There’s Jackson Huang, whose mom, Tina, is the only hairdresser left at Sunshine Clips. While he secretly practices magic tricks, his mother harbors secrets as well – a dream of becoming an artist.
There’s Kevin, who works at the bookstore across from the Huangs and lives in a tiny house on his mother-in-law’s lawn with his wife and twins. He’s idle at a job he doesn’t care for, yet not actively moving forward with any career plans. His family is stuck in a sort of limbo – his wife, Gwen, is an adjunct professor in search of a tenure-track position, and Kevin himself dropped out of his Ph.D. program, never finishing his dissertation.
Then, there’s the elderly Ro, who is Kevin’s neighbor and visits Sunshine Clips weekly, mostly for socialization. While she struggles to prove her open-mindedness to her deceased husband, who encouraged her to be kinder towards the non-white and LGBTQ+ people moving on to their street and into Albany, most of the community still views her as a bigot.
Finally, there’s Maria, a senior in high school who works down the hall from Tina and Kevin at Chickety Chix and dreams of being an actress yet was snubbed for the role of Maria in her high school’s production of West Side Story – a decision that has larger, and violent, implications later in the story.
While these characters seem disparate – ranging in age, race, education, and socioeconomic status – their lives convene at the mall, where they all either work or, in the case of Ro and Jackson, kill time. Jackson talks to Maria about his magic as his mom cuts hair, Ro gifts her husband’s old items like a camera and silk scarves to Jackson, Maria confides in Kevin, and so on.
Each of the chapters in You Are Here, ordered by month to cover about an academic year, reads like a short story and in fact, the first chapter, “The Sweeper of Hair,” started as a short story and serves as the launching point for the novel.
The novel explores the perceived staleness of both the current state of malls (from the beginning, we are told that “there’s rumors the whole mall will be shutting down soon.”) and of suburbia (the main characters all dream of something beyond Albany – Jackson of becoming a magician, Tina of becoming an artist, etc.). From the mall’s suspected oncoming closure to the underwhelming careers of each character, there is a real sense of decay and washed-up-ness, a point Lin-Greenberg emphasizes when a visiting magician tells Jackson he is performing at “Chuckles, where the washed-up comedians usually do their shows.”
On top of the dreariness and obsoletion pervading the novel that leave each character in a state of limbo, Lin-Greenberg builds off of the theme of futility in the face of larger systems. Many of the characters feel overwhelmed with their failed ambitions, stunted careers, and disheveled life balances (“I can’t keep up with your questions…I can’t answer them and try to schedule a scissor sharpening and do everything on my own,” Tina says as Jackson peppers her with questions). The consistent themes of obsoletion and futility mirror closely the state of malls today, on the decline but trying their best to stay relevant.
However, You Are Here is not all decay and gloom. Within it are characters you will grow to feel deeply for – their embarrassment, guilt, and disillusionment will make you want to lean in and give them a hug. While each one of them may be flawed, they are so believably human and fleshed out that you can understand why they are the way they are and each one harbors a secret or background that furthers your understanding of their current state. You can picture them in your own life, or mall, almost seeing them walking past you in the food court.
You Are Here is gentle, introspective, and human in every sense of the word. It brings to life a community, loosely yet clearly, bound together by a mall on the decline. Even though it is still early in the year, I’m ready to call it one of the best books of 2023.
You Are Here is available from Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Elliott Bay Book Company, Face in a Book, The King’s English Bookshop, Moon Palace Books, and 27th Letter Books.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog that she is hoping to get into modeling. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.