From Publishers Weekly
This nicely balanced collection of 20 stories--most of them familiar--from the past 15 years was a Literary Guild selection in cloth. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Still a cultural pulse-taker, Coupland (Generation X, 1991) organizes his hip bromides and next-wave sententiousness into a rather humdrum narrative that's long on posturing, short on plot. Laughing at disaster, Coupland's post-post-baby-boomers rationalize the culture of constant change, self-reinvention, and immediate gratification. Tyler Johnson, the 20-year-old narrator whose ``memories begin with Ronald Reagan,'' is an apocalyptic entrepreneur, a hotel-motel studies major who believes wholeheartedly in a boundless future, one he hopes to see as an employee for a northwestern conglomerate presided over by his personal hero, the CEO author of Life at the Top. A smart and glib media savant, Tyler speaks ``telethon-ese'' with his girlfriend and dubs his room at home the ``modernarium.'' His mother, Jasmine, a hippie with armpit hair and a ``predilection for substance enthusiasts,'' represents everything that was wrong (in Tyler's view) about the Sixties. His grandparents, on the other hand, hoard their wealth and greedily pursue their pyramid sales scheme, marketing a cat food ``system.'' Meanwhile, Tyler's summer fling in Paris comes to haunt him. The haughty and selfish Stephanie, one of the ``low-ambition Euro-teens'' he met on vacation, convinces him to move to L.A. with her in pursuit of fame and riches. Their adventures on the road include a visit to the commune where Tyler was born and a nightmarish stay at his father's drug farm. In L.A., Tyler works a fast-food ``McJob,'' while Stephanie secretly finds a sugar-daddy. Chastened by his low-life in la-la-land, Tyler returns home, rewarded with a dream job and a happier family. This TV/computer/video-savvy fiction is a frank celebration of life as a series of theme parks. Coupland's social commentary is, at its worst, fortune-cookie profound and, at best, a gloss on the Zeitgeist. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
The New York Post An eye-catching prose style and a firm grip on the zeitgeist...Coupland's a brilliant wordsmith...

Playboy ...the witty humor, vulnerable uncertainty, and self-deprecating honesty of his narrator...makes Coupland's novel so exceptional.


Review
Playboy ...the witty humor, vulnerable uncertainty, and self-deprecating honesty of his narrator...makes Coupland's novel so exceptional.


Book Description
Shampoo Planet is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide -- those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, "Global Teens." Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed. This six-month chronicle of Tyler's life takes us to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison's grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultra-modern Seattle, and finally back home. On the way we meet a constellation of characters, among them: Jasmine, Tyler's Woodstock mom; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; "Princess Stephanie," Tyler's European summer fling; and Anna Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder. Tyler's dizzying journey into the contemporary psyche -- a voyage full of rock videos, toxic waste, french-fry computers, and clear-cut forests -- is a spellbinding signature novel for a generation coming of age as the millennium comes to a close.

ANNOTATION

From the author of Generation X comes a visionary first novel about today's 20-something generation and their baby boom parents. A 20-year-old, tree-hugging Reagan youth with a "shampoo museum" in his bathroom deals with love and loss and forges a much-needed style of common sense for life.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Shampoo Planet is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide--those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, "Global Teens," the generation after Generation X.

Tyler Johnson is a twenty-year-old MTV child. Once a baby raised in a hippie commune, he now sells fake Chanel T-shirts, collects shampoo and studies hotel/motel management in a small northwest city saddled with a dying mega-mall and a collapsed nuclear industry. An ambitious Reagan Youth, Tyler dreams of escape and a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.Tyler's soon-to-be-single mother is the fortysomething Jasmine, a "hippie chick" with a Woodstock heart full of love--but also full of confusion because her 1960s dream has turned sour. Burdened with two failed marriages, three kids at home, and job layoffs, Jasmine wonders if the 1960s dream alone can protect her from the 1990s. Shampoo Planet's six month chronicle of Tyler's life takes us from his Washington State hometown to the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison's Paris grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, to the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, to a cheesy Hollywood, to ultramodern Seattle, and then back home. On the way we meet a constellation of other characters: Anna-Louise, Tyler's post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder; Neil, Tyler's Deadhead dope-ranching biological father; Daisy, his neo-hippie sister; Murray, her dreadlocked boyfriend; and Harmony, a rich computer hacker with a fetish for Star Trek and the medieval.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly