Customer Reviews

Shampoo Planet

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

If you're looking for a book that you are unable to put down because you can't wait to find out what's going to happen next?... I wouldn't recommend Shampoo Planet. I found it a little dull... it wasn't completely boring, I did somewhat enjoy it at the time... but it's one of those books that you quickly forget.

(But I DO recommend Hey Nostradamus!... Coupland worked his magic on that piece.)

Douglas Coupland made his biggest mark on literature with "Generation X," a witty satire on the jaded "Gen-Xers." This time, we have one instead of several, but Coupland's writing might be even tighter because of that. Witty, unpredictable and full of Coupland's little flickers of bitterness and sweetness.

Things start to go awry when ex-hippie Jasmice wakes up with "divorce" written on her forehead. Ambitious twenty-year-old Tyler is a living anti-hippie, devoted to hair-care, sleek technology and big corporations. He considers Jasmine the living figure of sixties idiocy, but he consoles his mother about her rotten husband's departure.

As he comforts Jasmine, he contemplates his own life, his sweet girlfriend Anna Louise, and his oddball family, which was based in a weird hippie commune when he was little. Things in Tyler's life are disrupted when the haughty Stephanie, a summer fling, comes to visit -- and stay. Tyler travels with his fling-turned-new-girlfriend to California, but finds himself more alone than he has ever been before.

In this book, Coupland takes a look at a small group of people -- young, intelligent college graduates who aren't sure whether to follow their dreams, or chain themselves to a big corporation. Don't worry -- it's not half as boring as it sounds. Coupland keeps the book vibrant with snotty Europeans, scraggly ex-hippies and the offspring they drive crazy.

Theme aside, Coupland has a way of tugging at the heartstrings, without becoming really sentimental, and reminds us that "the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself." His writing is sharp, solid and strangely evocative of a split world: half sand candles and flowers, half leather furniture and big-screen TVs. And he has a unique sense of humor -- he doesn't make readers really laugh, but just exposes the absurd side of things.

Tyler starts off superficial and rather snotty, and he spends much of the book doing the wrong thing. But Coupland makes him grow up slowly, making him see the worth of people he thought were freakish before. Not to mention his long-suffering girlfriend Anna Louise, who is obviously The Girl for Tyler. Jasmine is a very real portrait of an aging hippie -- full of life and sweetness, yet incredibly naive.

Douglas Coupland's "Shampoo Planet" tackles some of the same turf as "Generation X," yet it gets more intimate and sweet than his first novel did. Remember -- what's on top of your head does not say what's inside your head.

This is a very fine multi-generational tour with the junior college crowd in the town of Lancaster, Wa., with stops in Paris, Vancouver, and LA. A very funny ride that you'll breeze through! We go thru half-vanished malls, trailor parks, grandfathers busted in bad real estate deals who sell multilevel cat food, a very loving ex-hippie mother, and a vacuous stepfather, and other eccentrics of all ages. Well worth the ride and the time!

Douglas Coupland is not an acquired taste: you will like him or you won't. His pages are crammed with pop culture references and the musings of twentysomething malcontents. But if you like him, you will love this one, his best. It pulls you in from page one. He is also surprisingly serious underneath the banter, witness expecially two followng books, "Life without God" and "Girlfriend in a Coma." A great discovery.

A weak plot held together by an endless string of self absorbed commentary about the shallow values of the nineties and their effect on young people and the future of this country. Lighten up, Dougie, it's not that bad.

the title of my review says it all.

Douglas Coupland's follow-up to the "yuppie-busting" book, Generation X, has a heart of it's own and message devised through hip words and a journey for self-discovery. The book is about 20-year-old Tyler Johnson, who lives in the poor town of Lancaster, with his hippie mom, Jasmine, and his girlfriend, Anne-Louise. He's majoring in hotel management at the community college, while dreaming of wealth and wondering which hair product he should wear that day. The story is written perfectly, in a sardonic "teenty" voice, talking about things that happened in the past six months.

The book is meant to talk about the generation after Gen-X, which would be what scientists and researchers today call "Gen-Y" or "The Millenial Generation." Douglas Coupland predicted a lot of our qualities (materialism, mall-ratting, computer-savvyness) but made his character's too old. I don't wanna rag on Douglas, because this book rocks (I'm 14 so I'm Gen-Y), but if Tyler says, "My memories began with Ronald Reagan" then he must be talking about the kid sisters and brothers of Gen-X because Gen-Y was just born in 1982, a time when at five, they would've seen Reagan's end and Bush, Sr.'s beginning. Tyler is 20 in 1992, so that would mostly be of the tale-ends of Gen-X (born in 1972).

This book is a satire, so Douglas wasn't trying to be really accurate. He called them "Benetton Teens" because of the colorful attitudes that they have. This book is truly a classic and belongs and some kind of summer reading list.

I read Shampoo after I'd read Microserfs and Generation X. Being just a year or two shy of being of Gen X, I found that I related to these characters a lot better than the ones in Gen X. The main character, Tyler, is the product of a hippy family, but his main goal is to work for the corporation "Bechtol", a place his newly divorced hippy mother firebombed in her youth.

Along with Tyler on his adventures is his younger neo-hippy sister Daisy and her boyfriend Murray, his entreprenurial cat food selling grandparents, and his girlfriend Anna Louise. What Tyler has told her is of his fling in France with Euro girl Stephanie. As the novel winds on, Tyler's life choices take him down a road he probably didn't intend to go down, something that most people of this new "Generation Y" are familiar with.

The characters are funny, and well rounded, although the novel is filled with mostly hippy type characters, aside from Tyler and Stephanie and a few other minor characters. The counterculture like group of friends Tyler has seems a little odd considering his own personality, but it makes for interesting gatherings when all friends are together at the local burger hangout.

Coupland has capture the personality of French Stephanie par excellence, including the fantastic way he's written her voice and accent.

I think this book will appeal to a slightly younger crowd than Generation X, and could have a good overlap in audience with Microserfs, since the characters are fleshed out more fully. You get a chance to connect with Tyler, and even when you're kicking him for being an idiot, you also sympathize when it's obvious his choices have led him as far away from his goal as possible.

Also recommended: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez

The question that seems to burn in the mind of Douglas Coupland is "What Will the future of the world be like?" Unlike most authors who see a future of progress, Coupland tends to favor a future of regression. We live in a consumer's world -- a world with 100 different types of shampoo to choose from. And we buy, not the best, but the best advertised. Are we even able to think for ourselves anymore, or are we becoming a slave to the degenerating devices of modernity?

SHAMPOO PLANET is set in the early '90s. The small town of Lancaster, Washington, is beginning to shrivel into near-oblivion after the "plants" close down. The once-rich now live in RVs, stripped of their wealth. No one has a job, but no one leaves. The mall only has a few stores left open. The town is dying.

The past seems more promising than the future, so Tyler leaves the town in search of the past. He travels around Europe, only to find that the young people there have become complacent and content to party by night and take jobs as civil servants by day. History seems more exciting and progressive than the impending future of Generation Xers.

Tyler returns to Lancaster but then leaves again in search of his own past. He travels to the small island in Canada where he was born in a commune to hippie parents. All that is left to suggest that the island was once inhabited is a crumbling stone chimney. All other signs of human habitation have rusted and rotted, returning to the earth.

He then travels to California to seek his fortune. Like everyone else around him, he struggles to make it and finds himself only a-day-at-a-fast-food-restaurant away from being on the streets. He's working just to survive so that he can go back to work another day.

Coupland sees a future where consumerism leads to shallow existence. Perhaps we are regressing back to a a new series dark ages rather than progressing. Here's a bit of food-for-though from the book:...P>Coupland has, once again, written a witty and thought-provoking novel that gives a candid and un-romanticized view of what the present looks like and where it could be leading us. For the sake of humanity, I hope that he's wrong.

Coupland has a way of making all of his characters accessible to all readers. Moreover, he has deconstructed a generation, namely 'x', in order to explore their most basic wants and needs in Shampoo Planet. Truly, an extraordinary ride.