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.
what can i say? this book rocked! talk about a reboot of a character.
i never much liked the post-miller selina kyle in her latest incarnation and the hideous jim balent version made me want to scratch my nails across a chalkboard or screech like a cat in a fight. but this heist story is just what the comic doctor ordered for the woman.
i had avoided reading the book for its alterna-comic look, but i'm in now. dc really has something here.
the art is a perfect blend of jaime hernandez and dick tracy and the story is straight out of a pulp novel. just great.
buy it.
this is not the groundbreaking and character-changing event that the original the dark knight returns, but frank miller's return to the bleak, possible-future batman in dk2: the dark knight strikes again still shares a biting commentary on the progress of today's world with that original tale. however, this story, in keeping with miller's desire to make a statement on the development of comic books before the original, no longer holds any possibility of being just a generation away. the present dc comics continuity could not consistently lead to miller's dark knight, and that's just how he wants it.
all my favorite dc heroes make an appearance in the book, and i mean all of them. green arrow, the question, ray palmer atom, hal jordan green lantern, and the barry allen flash all factor strongly in the plot, and the creeper also makes an appearance if only to be killed by the new joker. but it is precisely the plot which i found weak in comparison to the original dark knight. i found the story to be full of the same sarcasm and nose-thumbing at today's media, but the actual plot-conflict was simplistic at best and all the real twists were in the pulling together of the cast. there are a couple of surprises, but they are in-jokes for those of us who've been reading comics since the silver age or earlier, rather than contributions to the actual story.
i found the book thoroughly enjoyable, but only as a reminder of what the present state of comics could have been, as seen through a jaundiced eye. i miss barry allen and hal jordan and i guess miller does too.
thanks, frank.