so, another book by douglas coupland, author of generation x, microserfs, and girlfriend in a coma. as in these other novels, the characters in shampoo planet are foaming with the desire to start over, free from the past and history, and at the same time unable to truly escape them. and this is good.
again, our protagonist (though in the modern novel this term may be nearing irrelevance) is a young man (named tyler johnson) who is both naïve and place-weary. i say place-weary, because, as opposed to world-weariness, when a person is place-weary the idea of anywhere else is both promising of all that is not where he or she is and, at the same time, necessary in the mind of that person to the success and development of him or her self. the idea of home is stifling, like history. tyler is itching to get out of the cocoon of his hometown and mother's house and into the corporate yuppie-world he admires so much.
but tyler, as opposed to the protagonists of coupland's other novels, is not a corporate drone who dropped out of the life (gen x), nor a drone who with others created their own hive (microserfs), nor is he a sleeper awakened by his coma-revived girlfriend to the reality of a world in its death-throes (girlfriend). no tyler is the slacker who doesn't quite realize it yet; who hasn't become jaded, though he thinks he is; he is the beginning of the story.
there is a tendancy, in coupland's novels, for him to create a coded subtext, most remarkably in microserfs, which is again evident in this book. tyler's felt-tip, fortune-cookie-like messages to people he knows on small denomination bills and his telethon-speech with his hometown girl, anna-louise, are not really communication to one another as characters, but meta-text to the reader about the reality of their lives. it, as i say, is less encrypted in this novel than the fables of the gen x-ers, ghost in the machine messages, and the apocalyptic dreams of the coma-surviving girlfriend, but this meta-text is still there for the between the lines reader.
overall, this book was gratifying for me, a reagan-era kid who had my own big plans ten years ago, when this book was set and written. i understood tyler, even if i disagreed with him. even as seen through his little experience and thinly-disguised optimism are amazingly insightful glimpses by coupland into the late-90s and early 21st century.
i think if someone read this book when it came out ten years ago and tossed it on a shelf with a "so that's what followed gen x" shrug, the book warrants another read. instead of the now-cliché gen x life-is-no-big-deal message, this book says that life is as serious as you choose to make it.
juiced June 24, 2003 03:21 PM | pokes (0)