"Shampoo Planet"
Blazes of color and type, four-note hooks and half-sentence squibs, layered together in heavy rotation until you're sure the meat is real this time, real, fresh, tasty, new, hot - and then returning in thirty seconds with the new bait: This is marketing. The first generation to come of age in the fullness of its roar is blinking its eyes and trying to tell its TV-deafened story. Douglas Coupland's very funny book, _Shampoo Planet_, gets this sense down cold. If his characters, skimming a culture of their own off the firehose that's trained on them, seem cartoonish; if the plot buried under the delightful mess of language is strictly undergraduate; if the overall taste is of Don DeLillo in child-sized portions; that's all in character. The surprise is that Coupland doesn't seem to grasp what has been lost: _Shampoo Planet_ isn't filled with rage, and it ought to be.
Shampoo Planet, by Douglas Coupland, 1992, $20, from Pocket Books, 800 223 2348.
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