TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
waits outside Louis Vuitton to
score. Her prey? A Damier, which
start around $1,620. She invests
about 30 minutes from line to exit,
leaving Damierless.
While some shoppers sport
bags from Vuitton or the holiday
spectacular that is Nordstrom’s
shoe department, the most com-
monly clutched purchases list
toward the discount stores.
This season, retail analysts be-
moan the paucity of international
tourists, who can help goose sales.
Striding through King of Prussia
is Hea Han, a Buddhist monk orig-
inally from Cambodia, with fellow
monk Vibol Chihorn, who arrived
in the United States only two days
earlier. Both wear robes the color
of turmeric.
“It is so surprising,” Han says of
the mall. “So interesting.” He has
purchased not a thing.
Around 5 p.m., the mall begins
to still, as much as King of Prussia
ever stills. A second-shift Santa
sits on his perch, alone.
“People seem more lively.
They’re going to be glad to be
here,” says Santa photo manager
Alyssa Yiaski, 21, a psychology ma-
jor at Gwynedd Mercy University,
who also works part-time at
Wawa. “No matter how old you,
everyone still wants that holiday
magic.”
In all, 81 people pose with one
Santa or the other that day, most
opting for the $50 package, seven
prints plus digital downloads.
That’s a little more than half of
peak daily traffic, but Yiaski will
take it.
[email protected]King of Prussia Saturday, mall
workers will tell you, is 2 to 4 p.m.
It’s ecstasy or agony, depending on
your view of crowds and lines,
covid and malls, being and noth-
ingness, and here is Moore arriv-
ing right in the crux of it. Mall
parking tends to extinguish all
goodwill-toward-humankind
feelings.
A line stretched outside the
Lego emporium fronted by a
monosyllabic, unsmiling door-
man, the sort usually employed by
nightclubs.
B ut, lo and behold, Moore and
Sienna had scored. “She loved it,”
Moore says, as Sienna clutched
her customized trio of minifig-
ures.
Many, many yards away and,
not to name-drop, but we catch up
with the man of the moment, the
GOAT of the mall... S anta!
Last Christmas, this Kriss Krin-
gle skipped hearing gift requests
in person because the mall would
not provide a plexiglass shield.
Instead, he Ho Ho Hoed from
home, Zooming 300 times.
But here he is Pfizered, greeting
fans of all ages, including Mark
Murphy, 59, and Eric Hasper, 60,
of Manhattan with their 6-year-
old schipperke, Alice. K of P is
hound-friendly.
“ Two of my kids are mad as heck
at me because I’m a big fat guy
sitting here without a mask,” says
Santa in a pronounced Philly ac-
cent. “It’s a bit hard on my nerves
but I get so much energy from
being here.”
Dallas Selby, 30, a group home
manager from Wilmington, Del.,bother. Confesses one veteran Nei-
man Marcus saleswoman, “ I never
leave the cocoon of the store.”
Because of covid, store hours
have been reduced: later open-
ings, earlier closings. Normally,
Santa arrives Nov. 1. This year, he
alighted Nov. 12. That is, the first
two Santas, who split a shift. The
second set arrived a week later,
sharing duties at a second loca-
tion. And, if their knees get too
knackered, there’s a backup Santa.
King of Prussia is a five-Santa
mall.
Some stores molt before us. A
venerable mattress showroom,
not one of those newfangled Inter-
net ones, is utterly devoid of cus-
tomers for hours. Two bored sales-
folk fiddle with their phones in the
back, the entire tableau resem-
bling a lost work by Samuel Beck-
ett.
There is a palpable need for
help — or better help — particular-
ly at those chains slouching
toward bankruptcy, the ones
where you can smell failure.
(What does failure smell like?
Year-old tube socks, crumbling
peppermint treats, unfolded fon-
dled sweaters, cloying eau de toi-
lette.)
Apple, as always, is jammed.
Tesla, jumping. Most models
won’t arrive until deep into next
year, a salesman warns, and somerecent season of “Stranger
Things.”
Malls, sadly, have also been the
site for recent carnage: There have
been mall shootings in Virginia,
Tennessee and California in the
last few days, with the last two
including fatalities.
Tenant sales at the nation’s top
malls, like King of Prussia, are up
10 percent over 2019 says Vince
Tibone, senior analyst at the re-
search firm Green Street. (Simon
Property Group, which operates K
of P and retail properties in 37
states, declined to comment for
this story.)
The mall feels simultaneously
all-too-familiar and quasi-weird.
The good news: There are a lot of
people here on a November Satur-
day.
The bad news: There are a lot of
people here on a November Satur-
day. Approximately half of them
are masked. Are they vaccinated?
Who knows?
Montgomery County, home to
K of P, recommends wearing
masks indoors but doesn’t man-
date them (though it does in its
government buildings). Conse-
quently, the mall offers a dizzying
smorgasbord of rules: Some mer-
chants request masks, some gen-
tly suggest them, others don’t
MALLS FROM C1
At some American malls,
consumerism still reigns
offers surety during our fall of
supply-chain discontent and you-
want-that-when? delivery anxi-
ety. The mall makes good on the
proverb that a Lego in the hand is
worth more than two idling in a
container at the Port of Los Ange-
les.
After staying away from the
mall for nearly two years, Sherry
Moore of West Chester, Pa., has
returned for the second time in
four days, this time accompanied
by her elated 6-year-old daughter,
Sienna. The 47-year-old nurse
seems somewhat incredulous
about her actions.
“On Wednesday, I breezed in
and out of here in a half an hour
and got front-row parking,” she
says.
Not so today. The heartbeat of anot until March of 2023.
I n the mall’s cool luxury vortex,
past the Corridor of Extravagant
Timepiece Emporiums, lines
spool outside Gucci and Hermes;
the longest is 20-deep for Louis
Vuitton. Black-clad, iPad-wield-
ling concierges assist customers
waiting to enter the mono-
grammed mecca to consult with
one of 10 “client advisers” inside.
With supply-chain challenges,
there may be fewer discounts and
in-store promotions of the buy-
five-get-two-free variety, Tibone
cautions. Expect to pay more, or
spend more time trying not to.
Currently, shelves are full. They
may not be full of what you want.
But in addition to offering a
torrent of spritzed fragrances and
10,000 steps by 2 p.m., the mallSARAH SILBIGER/GETTY IMAGES
Shoppers at Pennsylvania’s King of Prussia mall in November 2019.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the retail spot is thriving.NEW YORK, MY
VILLAGE
By Uwem Akpan
W.W. Norton.
404 pp. $27.95how racism heightens Ekong’s
suspicions and clouds his judg-
ment. Consider the priest in New
Jersey who tells him and his An-
nang friends not to return for
Mass the following week because
otherwise “more Blacks will be
here, and our church will be even
more divided.” Together with less-
incendiary encounters, this re-
buff leads Ekong, already
self-conscious and sensi-
tive, to second-guess ev-
erything. Are his col-
leagues at the publishing
house, one of whom he’s
informed of the bedbugs,
going to think that he
brought them from Afri-
ca? “I just wanted to be
accused of having the
same bedbugs as the rest
of NYC,” he laments.
With time, Ekong becomes at-
tuned to an intriguing paradox of
his host country. American cul-
tural omnivorousness, which is
pronounced in the realms of cui-
sine and music, remains hostage
to a decidedly provincial rider:
For something of foreign prov-
enance to gain traction, it must
undergo Americanization. Hence
Ekong’s humorous yet telling di-
lemma concerning how to ensure
that the West African meal he
cooks for Thanksgiving will find
favor with his neighbors. “Would
these American friends of mine
even eat any of this?” he muses.
“The word jollof might even scare
them, I worried, though it was one
of the most popular West African
dishes worldwide!... What if I
called jollof rice Kelly King Rice,
or Better Than Sex Rice?”
There’s something ironic about
this. Akpan, who good-naturedly
pokes fun at Ekong’s clumsy yet
endearing attempts to squeeze all
things Nigerian through an
American filter, employs the same
artifice in constructing his novel’s
narrative. Why transplant Ekong
to the United States? Surely be-
cause by doing so, the author can
envelop a putatively alien West
African war story in a familiar
American setting.
More troubling than apparent-
ly unintended irony is that Ak-
pan’s stratagem doesn’t imbue
him with enough confidence to
give free rein to that historical
war story in any of the fictional-
ized iterations with which he toys.
Only toward the end of a novel
gravid with the ghosts of Biafra do
a couple of them, including Fa-
ther Kiobel’s, finally burst forth.
They prove as shuddersome as
that of Ekong’s father. But it’s too
late. By this point, we cannot
banish the disturbing impression
that the chronicle of Ekong’s so-
journ in New York is a literary
interloper usurping the deserving
story’s place.
[email protected]Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and
book critic in Malta.BY RAYYAN AL-SHAWAFArguably the most powerful
tale in Uwem Akpan’s debut, a
collection of short stories titled
“Say You’re One of Them,” was set
in his native Nigeria amid ghastly
sectarian violence. All the more
exciting, then, that the author’s
first novel, “New York, My Vil-
lage,” should feature a
Nigerian encumbered by
the legacy of his coun-
try’s 1967-1970 civil war.
That protagonist and
narrator is Ekong, the
managing editor of a
small publishing house
in Nigeria who travels to
New York for a publish-
ing fellowship to learn
more about the industry
and edit an anthology by Nigerian
writers. During his four-month
stay, he contends with bedbugs at
his Hell’s Kitchen apartment and
finds himself thrust into one mis-
adventure after another. A few
such experiences give rise to in-
sightful takes on American cul-
ture, yet in the aggregate, the
material comes across as meager
and undernourished, especially
when compared to a substantive
Nigeria-set backstory that cata-
lyzes the novel.
The backstory is the Nigerian
Civil War. For Ekong’s Catholic
family and others who lost loved
ones to that conflict, it is forever
symbolized by their having held
“burial Masses using pants and
shoes and shirts in place of bod-
ies,” which had been made to
disappear. The minorities of Ni-
geria’s Delta region, including
Ekong’s people, the Annang, had
found themselves within the Re-
public of Biafra, a secessionist
state declared by ethnic Igbos.
Throughout the resulting grisly
conflict between Nigeria and the
Igbos, the latter persecuted those
Delta minorities, such as the An-
nang, they deemed disloyal. The
aggrieved Ekong observes that
the war, during which he was an
infant and from which Nigeria
emerged victorious, is “still rag-
ing within us” 50 years later.
Indeed, Ekong’s name means
“war” in the Annang language,
and the anthology he’s editing is
by minority writers scarred by the
conflict. Ekong’s own father fell
victim to Igbo oppression. His
harrowing fate, which Ekong re-
counts to his editor in chief in
New York, gives the novel an early
jolt. But we hear nothing more of
him. And the tantalizingly murky
past of Father Kiobel, Ekong’s
parish priest in Nigeria’s Annang-
land, who is rumored to have
served as a child soldier on the
Igbo side, is repeatedly hinted at
and then dropped.
Instead, Akpan, who lives in
Gainesville, Fla., and teaches cre-
ative writing at the University of
Florida, busies himself with
Ekong’s trials and tribulations in
New York. Some of these are very
funny. The more dramatic ones,
however, often involve an oblique
bigotry that incongruously veers
toward overt racism, such as
when Ekong’s affable Black
neighbor Keith suddenly, during
a nonconfrontational exchange,
begins spewing anti-African vitri-
ol.
That said, Akpan deftly reveals
BOOK WORLD
The long shadow of Nigeria’s
civil war reaches New York
U wem AkpanHis vision for ATN — “Deep State
conspiracy hour but with, like, a... w ink” — is the inevitable
dystopian outcome of a company
run purely on greed and pitch-
black cynicism, and other than
the wink, it doesn’t seem too far a
leap from the current program-
ming. And as far as Logan is
concerned, his TV exec mandates
for a presidential candidate are
that “they get it and they pop” —
vague qualifications that depend
on a single man’s personal tastes
and whims, yet still underscore
that it’s got nothing to do with
vision, policy or leadership. With
his weapons-grade apathy unex-
pectedly enabled by an overcom-
pensating Logan, Roman be-
comes something he’s seldom
been: terrifying.
That means the big loser of
“What It Takes” is Shiv, who, as
the sole voice of reason, is increas-
ingly unheard. “Stop Chicken Lit-
tle-ing us,” Roman tells her as
Mencken increases in Logan’s es-
timation (echoing conservatives’
dismissal of liberals about
Trump), as Shiv sputters on about
abortion rights and union orga-
nizers. “I am genuinely concerned
that we could slide into a Russian,
Berlusconi, Brazilian f---pile,” she
proclaims, to total indifference.
As it dawns on her how danger-
ous and unwieldy the company
she wants to inherit actually is,
Shiv no longer tries to make her-
self useful to her dad — and
Logan’s ears turn deafer. The next
day, when he forces her to take a
family photo with a smirking
Mencken and the most she can
insist on is that she won’t be
standing next to him, Logan
sighs, “You win, Pinky.” She — and
the country — has done anything
but.
[email protected]
leys between Snook and Culkin,
the show’s most spirited sparring
partners.
Contempt, the Roy family lan-
guage, practically drips off the
episode. Kendall refers to the
summit’s itinerary as “burning
books and measuring skulls.” Shiv
tells Roman, quite correctly, “You
just love the boot because you
love to be kicked by it.” The Roys’
jokes are on the same scornful
wavelength as Mencken’s, and
they reinforce the allure of trans-
gression, especially when trapped
in an airless room full of human
bow ties.
All of this is meant to evoke
Rupert Murdoch’s eventual alli-
ance with Donald Trump and his
meme-loving base, of course. I
have no idea if conclaves like the
“ATN primary,” as one character
calls the event, actually exist. But
this depiction, however met-
onymic, certainly has an air of
truth about it, partly because it
underscores how terrifyingly
powerful ATN actually is, and
partly because no one with an
ounce of conscience is at its helm,
or even close to it.
Thus far on “Succession,” Way-
star has largely been a MacGuffin
— what the Roy children really
want is their father’s love and
approval, and the money and
power that would come with be-
ing in charge seem pretty great,
too. But Season 3 has made much
more explicit the Frankenstein’s
monster that Waystar is; the Roys
can’t quite control the behemoth
they’ve created.
In last week’s episode, when
the network accidentally topples
POTUS, Roman says, “It’s kind of
nice to know that we can, like,
puppet-master the whole Ameri-
can republic project and all, but”
and never finishes the sentence.their father on his favored candi-
date: dark horse Jeryd Mencken
(a shark-eyed Justin Kirk, distin-
guishing himself even on a season
packed with notable guest stars).
An incredulous Shiv, who once
wondered where she would get
the actual news if her dad
amassed even more media out-
lets, sums up the intellectually
hollow but unmistakably hateful
Mencken as a “YouTube provoca-
teur” whose vibes are specious
“aristo-populism... ‘rape is natu-
ral, it’s all red pill, baby.’ ” Midway
through the episode, Mencken
calls ATN the televisual equiva-
lent of a “pudding cup at the
nursing home at 5 p.m.” within
Logan’s earshot — a seeming faux
pas later revealed to be a planned
negging.
Logan falls for it, hook, line and
sinker. Seeking to prove his virili-
ty after suffering from a debilitat-
ing UTI in the previous episode,
possibly through seducing Kerry
— who’d be surprised if she be-
came the latest Mrs. Roy by the
end of the season? — Logan em-
braces Mencken as his candidate
of choice, the latter’s winking
nihilism the closest thing the 80-
something can get at hand to a
shot of youth. If ATN’s a pudding
cup, Mencken’s a Monster Energy
drink.
I don’t want to lose sight of how
hilarious “What It Takes” is, al-
most flamboyantly so. The fears
of Shiv’s husband, Tom (Matthew
Macfadyen), about his impending
year behind bars as Waystar’s fall
guy — a running gag this season
and hardly mollified by his “pris-
on consultant” — are at a fever
pitch. And with former heir ap-
parent Kendall (Jeremy Strong)
currently out of the running, Shiv
and Roman are at each other’s
throats, giving us extended vol-— and his real-life counterparts —
wield on a global scale.
“What It Takes” is an excep-
tionally funny and chilling chap-
ter of a show that specializes in
those polarities. There’s a joke-
machine velocity to the humor,
which might only be fully appre-
ciable upon a second viewing,
given the speed of the dialogue
and the resulting crosstalk. But
it’s also a deeply tragic window
into the impulses of the Roys,
which are seldom not petty, fleet-
ing or underconsidered. Theirs is
a power no single individual or
family should possess — not least
because it’s one that’s utterly self-
absolving of responsibility. And
for once, Armstrong and his writ-
ers don’t shy away from the chaos
and destruction in the larger
world, beyond his realm, that a
single glance by Logan can set
into motion.
After ATN sinks the (unseen)
president’s chances for reelection
as part of a not especially
thought-out r etribution plan for
the investigation into Waystar —
such is the TV network’s impact —
Logan is presented with four op-
tions for a successor. No one likes
the most obvious choice, Vice
President Dave Boyer (Reed Bir-
ney). Shiv (Sarah Snook), the sole
Roy daughter, tries to sell her dad
on Rick Salgado (Yul Vazquez), an
old-school, National Review-sub-
scribing conservative and the
least objectionable choice to a
center-left, lean-in feminist like
herself. Logan’s firstborn, Connor
(Alan Ruck), who’s been running
a vanity campaign on a platform
of abolishing taxes, pitches him-
self to a roomful of eyerolls. And
so it’s Logan’s most feckless child,
Roman (Kieran Culkin), who sellsNOTEBOOK FROM C1On ‘Succession,’ the family that preys togetherM ACALL POLAY/HBO
J ustin Kirk, left, as Jeryd Mencken, a hollow and hateful presidential candidate, and Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy in “Succession.”