"What is the side effect of technology development?" This book "Shampoo Planet" suggests that technology is always changing, but humans are difficult to change their ideas. Those things start to go awry when 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.

I think his story suggest that materialistic, consumer-driven economy of 1980's and 1990's America. He describes human emotions and their ideas. Especially, Douglas Coupland has captured the personality of French Stephanie par excellence, including the fantastic way he's written her voice and accent.

This book is in SF category, but there are not tiny detail descriptions about technology. I think that Douglas Coupland just shows his own idea and suggestions into this novel. I think this book is not good for the people who love the normal scientific fictions.

This book drove me crazy. The characters were unsympathetic and generally shallow; this may have been the point but it didn't help w/ the book's readability. The metaphors were also painful. For example, "I thought I was going to be permanently warped by loneliness, like a record being scraped by a screwdriver" or "the aura of strained, un-discussable pseudo-cheer near my grandparents, like partying in a house in which the mother has recently died" or "Jasmine's caught KittyWhip fever--like a plague sweeping a medieval walled town--you never know who'll be the next to go." Warping does not equal scraping. And wait...why would you party in a house where someone had died? And fever doesn't equal plague; and plagues are not often random in its scope. Grrrr. It was saved from one star by the fact that Coupland has a larger message (that he unsuccessfully communicated due to distractions like the above) and by the world's best letter from a mom to a young man.

The book is set in a not-uncommon landscape: Lancaster's biggest corporation has failed/closed unexpectedly, and those who worked there are out of jobs. The rest of the town folk who relied on those employees spending money shopping, etc, are now also struggling. The corporation made secret and dangerous items for the feds; they had poor waste disposal practices, and the town now has the fun task of dealing w/ dangerous buried remnants. So, without high paying scientific jobs available to the youth, what does the future look like? What makes people happy? What are the common goals of the society? Our protagonist Tyler is a bright kid. After his mom escaped from a hippie commune, he was raised in a positive environment lacking male role models (see opening sentence). He is ambitious - he wants to follow all the rules of the American dream in order to lead a comfortable, consumer lifestyle with good hair. Looks are important to Tyler and having nice things is important to Tyler but he is still a good person. Ironically he judges most harshly those he is most trying to become - Dan and his grandfather. This is a coming-of-age story where the protagonist is a little older than the normal teenager; maybe this is another difference in our modern world of privilege. Tyler is never hungry or unsafe or challenged by diversity. He has solidly first world problems.

The metaphor of hair is clever; in "Shampoo Planet" hair matters. Hair is a statement of intent and personality, almost like a calling card. It might be one of the few things folks have complete control over: the choices made to one's hair are a life choice - dreadlocks vs pixie cut vs full body waves - as Tyler states, one could become famous at any time; at that point one's history would become public knowledge and one's hair is an integral part of that. The subtext is also masculinity; Dan associates Tyler's hair w/ a shallow character - the traditional (and dying?) masculine's commentary on the new youth culture?

4.4 stars, super quotable funny and deep

An intreaguing look into capitalism and what it has made of Americans. It alo carries a storyline of self discovery and finding what is most important in life.

I struggled to stick with this one, a bit. It seemed very disjointed to me at first, and I had difficulty remembering who the characters were.

There are some wonderful turns of phrase in this book, though, and these kept me reading to see what else Coupland would come up with. A couple of examples are "..we ordered orange juice in an extremely Marge roadside diner," [Chapter 49] and "...San Francisco and wooden houses painted the color of children's thoughts [Chapter 48]."

good book, i'm just not sophisticated enough nor do I care for the narrators life.
The narrator in question, ( who strictly speaks in Panic! at the disco lyrics and similes.) is generally awful, which I can appreciate. Kinda an overwhelming amount of 'manic' women through out, which bugged me since I wish they had more substance. Maybe in the future when I'm more pretentious and lonely and smarter I'll understand the book better...

Overall the entire thing read like a Ryan Ross live journal entry (obviously) and a loner male fantasy.

The drop in quality between my first Douglas Coupland and my second Douglas Coupland is greater than I would've liked it to be; granted, I can't expect them all to be great or as good as I believe the best one is (which right now, out of these two, is Eleanor Rigby). But I'm not giving up yet!

Shampoo Planet, a slice-of-life tale of the life of a 20-year-old named Tyler, doesn't have even half of the emotional profundity or the insightful humor of Eleanor Rigby and doesn't really go anywhere or say anything interesting until Part 3 of 3 when it enters into melancholic territory, when Tyler's actions and flaws catch up to him. Everything before that is kind of a bore, but at least Coupland knows how to write and write from someone in the first person (I'm admittedly a sucker for first-person perspective writing). I love slice-of-life cinema so I was excited to read a slice-0f-life novel and it just didn't hit like I hoped it would or wanted it to - but, again, like I said, Part 3 was a lot better.

Coupland is known for having a good understanding of the Generation X psyche, and I can see a lot of the characteristics of that generation put on paper fairly well, but some of it felt more akin to my generation, Generation Y (the Millennials). He gets their (Gen-X) general backgrounds correct and their entrepreneurial spirit right, their sociability, but when it comes to their interest in materialism and their reliability on others, that seems more in common with Gen-Y. But he does accurately roast Boomers for their denial of certain truths and their selfishness.

Shampoo Planet isn't a book I'd steer anyone away from but it's not one I'd highly recommend either. If it wasn't for Part 3 this would be getting 2 stars.

Il secondo libro di Douglas Coupland, scritto dopo “Generazione X” e prima di “Microservi”. Trovato su una bancarella, usatissimo, per due euro. Essendo uno dei suoi primi libri speravo in qualcosa di fresco e innovativo, rispetto alla “maniera” su cui lo scrittore si è seduto negli anni successivi, ma in realtà non mi ha entusiasmato come “Fidanzata in coma”, secondo me il suo migliore, o il profetico “Microservi”, alla recensione del quale rimando chi fosse interessato ad approfondire.

In realtà, sono rimasto un po’ deluso. Mi sono ormai fatto l’idea che Coupland sia un po’ lo Stefano Benni canadese, non tanto per l’attitudine al realismo magico quanto per il fatto di combinare e ricombinare in tutte le sue narrazioni gli stessi elementi, con la conseguenza di creare un prodotto che finisce per essere alla fine piuttosto scontato, salvo qualche occasionale botta di genio. I suoi scenari prevedono abitualmente giovani, di solito amici tra loro, che vivono abbastanza sulla superficie delle cose e questa sensazione di superficialità per loro è da un lato un’afflizione, dall’altro una certezza rassicurante da cui non paiono essere molto interessati a sfuggire; paragoni e metafore a gogò, di solito abbastanza suggestivi e ficcanti; sentenze folgoranti e definitive un po’ su tutto; trame piuttosto esili e vissute senza grandi contorcimenti di passione (l’impressione è che si descrive, più che sentire), che sono di fatto non molto altro che un pretesto per inanellare quanto sopra. Qui si parla di una città del nordest degli Stati Uniti in fase di avanzata recessione da deindustrializzazione, costretta a dire addio a un’industria inquinantissima ma che aveva generato ricchezza e che ora la sua chiusura ha portato alla fine della comunità, con centri commerciali desertificati, quartieri fantasma, povertà e disagio. Il protagonista, Tyler, ha una mamma hippie, un fratello e una sorella, alcuni amici, una fidanzata e poi un’altra, una ragazza francese, Stephanie, conosciuta durante un viaggio in Europa e che poco tempo dopo piomba nella loro città per creare scompiglio, a cominciare dalla rottura con la fidanzata precedente. Ah, e poi due nonni materni ricchissimi che perdono tutto in una speculazione sbagliata e per sopravvivere non gli resta che aggrapparsi a una organizzazione piramidale per la vendita di cibo per gatti.

Giudizi, parole e sentenze sono spalmate a profusione, e sempre in modo assai appropriato, sui tic della società contemporanea, americana e non solo (tra l’altro ho sempre avuto come la percezione che tra le righe Coupland avesse una conoscenza dell’Italia che andava oltre lo standard pizza, spaghetti e mandolino; in “Fidanzata in coma” si parlava di Gianni Agnelli che si faceva di cocaina, in questo libro vengono nominati i paninari)*. Bello quello che dice Stephanie mentre i due sono in viaggio in California, dove hanno deciso di trasferirsi: partendo dal giudizio sprezzante di Tyler sui giovani francesi, la cui massima aspirazione pare essere ottenere un posto di lavoro pubblico, afferma che ciò dipende dal realismo dell’educazione familiare europea, in cui i genitori non caricano i figli di aspettative che andranno sistematicamente deluse, come invece succede negli USA (e in effetti Tyler si barcamena tra nauseata ironia per il mondo in cui si trova a vivere, mito del successo compreso - vedi l’assurda società piramidale del cibo per gatti, grazie alla quale, nelle parole del nonno, avrebbero fatto tutti soldi a palate - e una nemmeno troppo inconfessata voglia di ottenerlo anche lui, questo successo). E’ appena il caso di dire che Stephanie lo pianterà in asso in maniera assai brutale non appena avrà messo le mani su un californiano decisamente più “di successo” di lui.
Il titolo del libro, decisamente fuorviante, è stato dato dall’editore italiano per rieccheggiare evidentemente il successo del precedente Generazione X, ma non corrisponde a quello originale, “Shampoo Planet”.

*La cosa si spiega col fatto che Coupland, stante quello che dice Wikipedia, ha studiato anche allo IED di Milano.

Not my favourite book, it was ok. There was a lot of descriptions. The main character tyler pretty unlikable. Kind a quick read. Author has good writing skills. Just not my favourite story. Many pop culture references i did not get.

Generally you will be hard pressed to get a bad review of Douglas Coupland out of me. I like his later work better than his earlier but this is certainly a grand exception to the rule. Coupland's characters always have this keen insight into the future of the world, which says a lot about his ability as a writer. I can't help but feel that if I was a young adult in the time that he wrote this book that my conversations would sound a lot like the conversations he writes into his book, perhaps even snippets of narration would overshadow my personal thoughts about life and what things make it worthwhile. What really gets to me on a deeper level about his style of writing is the pervasive pessimism that permeates through the first three quarters of the novels. At some point though the characters always manage to make some sort of breakthrough, to gain an important insight that causes them to find happiness. This is not exactly how all lives work out, but its the way a person would really like life to work out. I feel as if the endings are both fantastic and plausible, Coupland is the equivalent to a motivational speaker to me. Read this book, I know I am probably going to re-read it within a year or two.

One of my favorites, I don't want to tell you what it's about. It's Built to Spill good, Paris, Texas good

Mr Coupland,

My freshman year of college, I met this kind of crazy chick named Molly. Oddly enough, Molly changed my life because she fueled my obsessed with a silly band (which led me to meeting the majority of my closest friends and some of the most awesome people ever) and she introduced me to you.

She and I were hanging out at a book store before a concert one night, and she suggested I read Shampoo Planet. And I did.

This book is perfect when your life is in transition. And you feel kind of lost. Like I did then.

Your words made me feel not so alone.

Thank you. A fan forever (despite whatever bizarre lit you put out).

N.