At the Galleria Shopping Mall

Coming of age narratives have been an expression of Western literatures since Oedipus. These stories focus on a character of a certain usually young age who undergoes, often involuntarily and unexpectedly, a traumatic experience and who emerges from it with an entirely new set of assumptions about the conditions of their life, indeed about their very identity. Given the poem’s focus on a nine-year-old child, the expectation might be that the girl learns some traumatic truth. But the Millennial generation demands a different kind of coming-of-age narrative. It is the uncle, not the girl, who learns, who undergoes, involuntarily and unexpectedly, the difficult process of illumination. Comfortable in the artificial world of a shopping mall, armed with a credit card and keen to evaluate products based on their labels, not their quality, Lucinda is already a grown up, already a creature of conspicuous consumption. She illuminates for the poet a hard insight into what has become the American identity. She is Lucifer, the light bearer.

The nature of the insight, however, raises an additional question. Hoagland, ever the astute critic of his era and his culture, asks, using this moment in a mall, whether American kids grow up differently.