Lots of Luster, Not Much Body

Shampoo Planet

by Douglas Coupland

Pocket Books

$20.00

Tyler Johnson is no Holden Caulfield--although you get the sense that he wants to be. An unfocused youth from the latest of the lost generations, Tyler drifts across states, oceans and experiences. He is chatty and conversational, swiftly taking us into his immediate confidence and assuming that we are enraptured by the details of his life.

Tyler's is a world where the length a car trip is measured by the number of songs that pass on the radio. His role model is Mr. Frank E. Miller of the Bechtol Corporation, an Iacocca prototype who has published an autobiography. Tyler's sources of pride include his Comfortmobile(a black Nissan) and his sleek, high-tech bedroom, which he dubs the Modernarium.

His ambition is shaped by the material world of the 1980s. How could it be otherwise? The twenty-year-old himself declares that "my memories begin with Ronald Reagan." But his optimistic dreams of success don't match the grim reality of a great idea gone sour. The Plants, the nuclear weapons facilities that made his hometown boom with prosperity, are now all but shut down, spreading a virus of unemployment and decay.

Its inhabitants wander aimlessly and joblessly; its Ridgecrest Mall, once the paragon of consumer culture, is mostly in plyboards. Tyler's dream world of the Sharper Image turned into a Woolworth's going-out-of-Business sale overnight.

A story of college-aged character in search of themselves, Shampoo Planet documents the generation that follows the wistful twentysomethings of Generation X. That book turned heads in 1991, making its author, Douglas Coupland, a darling of the cultural critics who grasped for a definition of the world's up-and-comers. Shampoo Planet is equally bleak and cynical, equally rich with insights into a new set of young Americans.

Coupland's chapters, like MTV videos, news-report soundbites and teenagers' attention spans, are brief and swift. Only a few pages long, they jump from subject to subject and rush to feed us snippets of information from Tyler's life. Much of Shampoo Planet is about its protagonist's remembrances--of his carefree childhood on a British Columbia hippie commune, of his vacationto Europe, of his alcoholic, get-rich-quick stepfather, Dan. like the Chapters they comprise, they follow each other in rapid-fire bursts. But what chiefly propels the plot is the choice Tyler must make between his hometown girlfriend, Anna-Louise, and his European summer fling, Stephanie.

If Anna-Louise is the nineties--practical, down-to-earth, good-humored-then Stephanie exemplifies the eighties. A "French babe" whom Tyler describes as "a rich girl from a mighty bourgeois family," Stephanie is self-centered, spoiled and materialistic. She cares more about her final destination that about the road she takes to get there. She is sleek, mean and untouchable. Like the Shiny decadence of the recent past, she is astoundingly appealing.

The novel's structure is choppy, and its purpose often seems disjointed and unfocused. We're never quite sure of the glasses through which to view Tyler's cynical world.

Is Shampoo Planet allegory? Tyler's hippie mom, Jasmine, may represent a generation of parents more confused and childlike than their progeny. His crunchy sister, Daisy, is one of those high-schoolers who echoes the hippies, self-righteously dedicating their lives and hairstyles to their doomed planet.

Or is Shampoo Planet meant to be biting parody? Descriptions of Tyler's pride and joy, his collection of hair-care products, attack the image-consciousness and blatant consumerism of today's post-teens. There is "SlimeWarrior...the shampoo of conquerors with patented ten-minute algaeplasma slime formula." And there's "HairHenge, containing folliclemaintenance secrets devised by the ancient druids." Not to mention "Monk-on-Fire, containing placenta, nectarine-pit extract, and B vitamins."

Tyler's pop wisdom, too, is definitively now, his concerns specific to a modern era: "Watching TV with another person is vaguely embarrassing--you feel like you're partially on display--like you're riding in a glass elevator at the mall."

These passages are the high points of Shampoo Planet, the moments when Coupland is at his wittiest and cruellest. This is the spirit of the "thought bombs" splattered in the margins of Generation X. ("Pull-the-Plug, Slice-The Pie: a fantasy in which an offspring mentally tallies up the net worth of his parents.")

But these nuggets of satire appear too seldom. While it paints a flashy picture, Shampoo Planet is weighed down by slightly-overwritten prose and a less-than-enthralling plot. Its sardonic ideas don't come along quite often enough to satisfy our hunger for a quick-and-easy definition of ourselves.

Holden Caulfield carried the sixties generation along by the sheer force of his subversive personality. But these are the choice-filled nineties, characterized by mallside food courts and 57 channels on the cable box. Personality turns our heads, but Tyler needs a little more than charisma to grab our attention for good.