Mike Williams

Definitely, yeah.

It struck me like that was a conscious decision to keep it vague and maybe that was to, so it would make the reader question, where are we?

And ultimately relate it back to themselves and their experience.

Well, the shopping centre plays a unique role in this suburb as it does in suburbs everywhere.

It's the centre, the place where you go when you don't know what to do.

This is definitely my experience growing up in the suburbs.

That's what you did.

Culture is a little bit harder to come by at times, but there's always the shopping centre and it's always the same.

So there's a feeling of control and

and safety.

Lynn talks about the air conditioning and the polished tiles and yeah that blanket of you know what you're going to get and at the same time it's always offering you new things and new things to buy in particular.

Well, as with many of the characters in this book, Lean is conflicted and she's possibly the most contradictory.

Everyone has contradictions in this book, but Lean probably most of all.

She's stuck between these two, I guess, positions of power.

You've got the power within the people who run the shopping centre and the key sort of multinational company called KAG,

which seems to be buying up everything around it and every week it's offering a new product.

And then this other group that she's been drawn to, these sort of community philosophers that slowly become more and more radicalized throughout the book and their fight for power against consumerism and capitalism.

what the shopping center stands for and what it means.

Although their philosophy is a little bit vague, Lean sits somewhere in between that as a business owner trying to make it in her ear cleaning and massage business, as well as going to these weekly community neighborhood watch meetings.

It's tough for her.