#45: Shampoo Planet Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Shampoo Planet is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide -- those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, "Global Teens." Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.

This six-month chronicle of Tyler's life takes us to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison's grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultra-modern Seattle, and finally back home. On the way we meet a constellation of characters, among them: Jasmine, Tyler's Woodstock mom; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; "Princess Stephanie," Tyler's European summer fling; and Anna Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder.

Tyler's dizzying journey into the contemporary psyche -- a voyage full of rock videos, toxic waste, french-fry computers, and clear-cut forests -- is a spellbinding signature novel for a generation coming of age as the millennium comes to a close.

Recommended if you enjoyed: Pynchon's Vineland; Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero; Nabokov's Lolita

Why?: As the late Richard Rorty liked to say of Lolita, the thing that these novels have in common is that they serve a vital purpose in that they make us aware of the cruelty that we ourselves are capable of. In Shampoo Planet, Tyler ends up committing an act of cruelty and then not being quite sure how or why it happened. He has always thought of himself as a good person, and is forced to re-evaluate his initial estimation of himself after this life-defining moment.