THE FIRST shopping mall Ewan Morrison ever saw was the one in Inverness.

He was a teenager at the time. He would travel two-and-a-half hours from his home in Wick to see it. "It was quite astounding," he remembers. "It was almost like the entire main street of Wick was under glass. It was brand new and shiny."

He wasn't the only one who made the trip. Before too long more and more people were travelling five hours there and back to shop in the big mall. "It practically shut down all the stores in Wick's high street," the author recalls. An early lesson in the seductions of consumerism and its costs. In his latest book – his fifth – he has decided to explore both further.

Tales From The Mall is a mixture of fiction and reportage, fact and fancy (though as all the fictions are based on real stories he was told they aren't actually that fanciful, including the one about the cleaner who used to mop the mall floor with his own urine), and once again finds Morrison worrying away at a totem of contemporary living.

In the past he has explored sexual behaviour (Swung), modern art (Menage; as the title suggests sexual behaviour features in that one too), divorce, long distance relationships and globalisation (Distance), while his first book, The Last Book You Read, covered most of those things along with office life and internet dating. He is a writer of the now rather than the then.

He is also – as he has been every time I've met him – an argumentative, opinionated (he himself might use the word ranty) contrarian and provocateur. A few weeks before we sit down to talk I'd chaired a debate on the potential cultural impact of Scottish independence in which he'd suggested Scotland may actually just be a figment of our collective imagination. "What if Scotland is a fiction we tell ourselves?" he suggests now. "What if national identity is melting away in the ear of multinational corporations?"

In short, Morrison specialises in chewy soundbites and nuggety ideas. Perhaps that's not a surprise for someone whose education was grounded in Marxism but now finds him questioning much of the legacy of 1960s liberal thinking. What does that make him? Always Interesting, I think. Even if you don't agree with him.

For example, ask him about his fascination with shopping malls and he starts talking about his parents. "My parents were hippies. Marxists. Very much against Americanisation of any kind. And Scotland has become increasingly Americanised and globalised. My parents were wrong in their prediction of the way Scotland would turn out. Scotland is just another modernised, globalised country now and Glasgow is the epicentre of that."

We are sitting, appropriately enough, in a coffee chain in St Enoch's shopping centre in the city (the city where he is now based with his American-Australian writer wife Emily Ballou) as he says this. This street, he points out, running up to Buchanan Galleries, is the seventh largest retail avenue in the world. "Glasgow is mall saturated. I thought that had to be addressed.

"People seem quite happy living a consumerist life and I thought I could talk about that. It's not really been much documented. How are we changing? How much control do we have over our own future? All these questions are represented by these big multinational things that are shopping malls."

How did he go about it? "I contacted a few malls and asked: 'Do you mind if I speak to your staff?' I was amazed when they said yes."

The result is a book that charts the shiny wipe-clean glamour of the mall and its grubby back-of-house realities (minimum wage, short-term contracts, sweatshop products).

"Your heartbeat goes down when you enter a mall because of all the calming music and nice light. It's a very seductive space and you lose track of time and can just drift. It's constructed to make you feel like that. But at the same time it is a genuine feeling of relaxation. It also ties in with the whole growth of pleasure culture and carefree spending and 'what the hell, I'll just buy this and worry about where the money comes from tomorrow'.

"Every time I come into a mall to buy something I leave with something else. I always think: 'I've treated myself because I'm worth it.' It's an interesting guilty pleasure." He mentions a big-name clothes store. We're both wearing its products. "It's all sweatshop stuff and we know that. In the back of our head we know consumerism is not great for the world. But then we go: 'Look at that suit for £60.' We let ourselves off."

In other words, we don't think about the consequences of our actions. In a way that's one of the themes of the book. "That's the thing that bothered me writing the book. The unforeseen consequences of some of the things that happened in history." He points out the inventor of the shopping mall, Victor Gruen, was a utopian socialist. "He started off planning to create a better society and it went wrong. It went wrong to the point where the Gruen effect is now a psychologically known condition where you get something you didn't set out to get.

"We didn't realise that if you build five different shopping malls on the outskirts of the city you're going to completely demolish the inner city and every shop is going to shut. People didn't realise that or didn't want to realise that. Also other things like the sexualisation of consumerism has had unforeseen consequences. I think it's instrumental in part to the break-up of families and the me, me, me culture." Look at the naming of Apple products, he says. iPods, iPads, iPhones. "It's all about your solitary plug-in to the world."

The world is atomising more and more, he argues, and faster and faster. "Part of my conspiracy theory is the rise of singledom. After capitalism built itself up on the family it's now found there's more money to be had in breaking the family into smaller single units. Divorce is really great for capitalism because you have to buy duplicate commodities. Two cars, two TVs, two beds. Not that there's some conspiracy of men with cigars in a room saying: 'Let's make everyone single' but the rise of singledom suits capitalism really well."

He fears we might even be seeing the start of the planned obsolescence of people's lives. "Everything's designed to break. What if that's now extended into our daily lives?"

In many ways this is classic Generation X thinking. Morrison is 43 and grew up when all the old orthodoxies were falling apart. But clearly a lot of this comes from his childhood. All his books are about the failures of different forms of utopian thinking.

He is fascinated by the messiness of human lives but also by the shiny dreams we console ourselves with – whether political, sexual or consumerist. I have a theory, I tell him. My theory is that he is attracted to utopian visions himself. He once wrote about his experiences of swinging in Glasgow (experiences that fed into the novel Swung) as "a free, open exchange with no hierarchy or competition". That sounds suspiciously utopian to me. He might have rejected his parent's beliefs but in some ways they still inform his world view.

"Yeah," he accepts, "it's your entire frame of reference. I think having utopian parents who really believed the world could be a better place set me up for conflict with the real world – just watching their dreams fail one by one. The end of Marxism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Americanisation. I think the game was really over for my parents because their mindset was built on that utopian idea. But then history came along and smashed that for them. So the idea of a broken utopia is absolutely an ongoing thing."

Perhaps the emphasis on brokenness is inevitable. His parents' beliefs led him and his sister to be bullied constantly, and often viciously, growing up. They were marked – literally, at times – as outsiders. Morrison's response was to make art obsessively. He has been making it ever since, first as a television director and now as a writer. "I think I was a neurotic child with psychological problems and it's taken me 30 years to be reasonably sane."

Reasonably sane seems like a result at the moment. At a time when the economy has gone to pot, when malls in America are closing and when social mobility effectively doesn't exist ("You've got a 93% chance to be stuck in your demographic box," he tells me at one point), Morrison is again off-message.

This is the best things have been for him for many years, he admits. There's another book, Close Your Eyes, due out in the summer, a film version of Swung on the cards (Variety has reported that Elena Anaya, star of The Skin I Live In, is in negotiations to star in it) and he's working on TV ideas. He is working on the world, not having the world work on him. His own obsolescence has been postponed for the moment.

Tales From The Mall is published by Cargo, priced £9.99.

Ewan Morrison