Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
...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...