Babes in Toyland
Atlantic, The, November, 2006 by Benjamin Schwarz
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It’s this country’s favorite form of public interaction and, along with watching television, of recreation. It claims more workers, and fills more space, than any other pursuit—considerably more nonresidential construction is devoted exclusively to it, though you can also do it in museums, houses of worship, airports, and hospitals.
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It wards off depression, emotional and economic. It reflects and promotes subtle and seismic shifts in societal attitudes, so it’s at once an unstoppable engine of change and among the most fickle, unpredictable, and vulnerable of human activities. It’s the emblem of modernity. Shopping. And in its voracious way it’s also become an increasingly fashionable subject for books. To be sure, novelists have long probed the topic: Balzac, in a celebrated passage in Lost Illusions, conveyed the fresh seductiveness of the goods on display in the wooden galleries of the Palais-Royal; Flaubert dissected Emma Bovary’s shopping-induced raptures; Zola, in The Ladies’ ...
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