Shop til we drop? Paul Berton’s new book ‘Shopomania’ catches all the action
Shopping. Is it, can it be - what did Martha Stewart used to say? - a good thing? That is the question around which Paul Berton's new book Shopomania" exuberantly spins.
It is certainly a good thing that Shopomania" is non-fiction. If it weren't true, no one would believe it. Or maybe we just don't want to believe it. Shopping is an often creepy funhouse mirror that throws back images of the shopper that are distorted, grotesque, even frightening and, yes, comical.
Do we recognize us" in the portrait this book presents? We have to. The proof is in the purchase.
Shopomania" is rife with stories and examples that Berton has judiciously gleaned from the all-too-well-documented (and surveillance camera-ed) zombie march that we do through malls, boutiques, yard sales, auctions, car showrooms and real estate open houses, pursuing our obsession with possession." These stories leave us laughing with derision and gulping with self-recognition at the same time.
Stories of the habits of the rich and famous, such as Frank Stronach buying a 12-storey high statue for $55 million.
Stories of the obscure and not so rich - we Pavlovian peons who answer even small discomforts with a triggered impulse to shop. We go shopping when it's hot and buy swimming pools, when we're hungry and buy too much food, or new mattresses when our muscles ache and a hot tub when there's a sprain.
The book, among other things, induces the feeling of gleefully reading what you think is someone else's Visa statement and then realizing, no, it's your own. This idiot. He bought ... wait, this is me? I bought ... what? For how much? How often?"
The Romans ate until they threw up so they could eat some more. And so we, in like manner, shop until we have so much we have to vomit out some stuff, or deshop" as Berton calls it, but only so that we can shop again.
It's the new veni, vidi, vici. We came, we bought, we're bonkers.
The theme of the book had been simmering in the depths of my soul for years and years," says Berton, editor-in-chief of The Hamilton Spectator. We feel snowed under by stuff.'"
As he set out to research and then write it, he had the book's skeleton already formed in his mind or, as it were, in his bones. It would be a dictionary.
Not a conventional dictionary; it's not in alphabetical order - for instance, in Shopomania," Anti-Shopper" comes after Shop-o-erotic." The words that are defined are, for lack of a better description, constructive" terms, ones built out of current words, prefixes and suffixes, combined in new ways - shopatorium," for instance - and to droll effect.
What the format does, in a way, is simulate the experience of shopping. You can jump into the book anywhere, browse around, move on if you're not finding what you think you want where you are, come back to it later.
A dictionary was always the structure for the book," says Berton. It (the dictionary format) enabled me to break up a complex story about consumerism, economics" - not to mention human psychology - into digestible bits."
Before Shopomania" gets into the dictionary format, though, there's a prologue/introduction that tees up the central opposition implicit throughout - our frenzy for stuff" versus the idea of a simpler, sparer way of being.
In the first pages, Berton recounts his experience as a young adult living with a family in the Himalayas in a house, home to a family of five, that clung to the side of mountain." The weather was bleak and unforgiving." They were poor and had virtually nothing. Yet," Berton writes, life went on cheerfully. They did not appear to want for anything."
He also writes of his childhood, playing in a sandbox with his brother. He had a 1961 Oldsmobile Starfire Dinky Toy. It was the most precious thing in the world to him. They grew up and walked away from the sandbox, as we all do. Are we all just shopping for the new Dinky Toy that will fill the void left by leaving home, youth, simplicity behind?
There are no simpler' times," says Berton. Shopping has always been with us. People like stuff.'" It makes us collectively unique as a species, he adds, and we often feel our particular stuff" make us individually unique.
As deliciously mockable as shopping and shoppers can be, shopping is an engine, says Berton, for progress, invention, economics and communication, bringing people together to transact, interact, in market places that become market places for ideas.
The key is to harness the shopping impulse, to resist the excesses of rampant consumption and disposability, which Berton is the first to decry as harmful to the environment and to us, socially and psychologically. The book, to its credit, advances the possibility of solutions, paths toward sustainability, in a spirit of optimism that is of necessity guarded, given the alarming momentum of consumerism.
Shopomania: Our Obsession With Possession," by Paul Berton, is published by Douglas & McIntyre. For more, see douglas-mcintyre.com
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com