Shampoo Planet is Douglas Coupland's 2nd novel. I mentioned in my review of Generation X that I really didn't start reading Coupland until many years after he had been a major figure in CanLit. In fact, I probably wouldn't have read him at all, except I was favourably impressed by his art exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery. At any rate, I still don't really seek out his work (or written work at any rate), but Shampoo Planet landed in the Little Free Library out front, and I seized the opportunity to read it.
One positive aspect is that it isn't just a rehashing of the themes of Generation X. While there are a few slacker-types in Tyler's circle, he himself is fairly ambitious, sort of a proto-yuppie, and wants to land a job at the Seattle-based Bechtol and escape Lancaster, the decaying Pacific Northwest city where he was raised. The interesting twist is that his mother (and biological father) are hippies. So this is a fairly straight riff off of Family Ties, though there is a moment in Shampoo Planet when Tyler's grandparents fall hard for a multi-level marketing scheme/scam selling KittyWhip Kat Food and even Tyler's mom, Jasmine, gets caught up in the excitement of making lots of money. The other minor twist (away from Family Ties) is that he has a very abrasive step-father, Dan, who is separated from his mother. Tyler only visits him a couple of times, though there is an amusing subplot where one of the French foreign exchange students falls for Dan before finding out what a phony he is.
I'll talk a bit about the plot, so SPOILERS ahead.
The plot, such as it is, involves the two students dropping in on Tyler, basically unannounced, leading to a break-up with his girlfriend, Anna-Louise. After being humiliated by the episode with Dan, one of the student takes off back to France. Tyler and the other student drive down to L.A., where she eventually gets into modelling (or at least tries to) and brushes Tyler off. Meanwhile this relatively outrageous pitch* about getting people to take vacations at landfills (by rebranding them as HistoryWorld ouposts) that Tyler sends off to Bechtol gets him noticed by Bechtol's president, and Tyler is invited to fly to Seattle for a job interview. (This seems almost lifted from another Michael J. Fox vehicle, The Secret of My Success.) As the novel closes, Tyler has partially reconciled with Anna-Louise. It does seem like he will escape Lancaster after all. The Canadian content of the book is fairly low, though I believe there is a comment that Tyler was born in B.C. and he makes a trip to visit his biological father, who lives in a sort of commune in northern B.C. Tyler is moderately engaging and not completely insufferable like full-blown Yuppies, but he might well become a full-blown jerk after a few years at Bechtol. Anyway, this was a fairly quick read, and the book fortunately didn't take itself too seriously.
* The same type of out-of-left-field pitch surfaces in "Kirkland Products," one of the 60(!) short stories in Coupland's latest effort, Binge, which I'll be reviewing next. I guess it is a plot device he likes.
No comments:
Post a Comment