SOURCE: “Teen Themes,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4690, February 19, 1993, p. 23.

In the following review, Shone comments on the novel Shampoo Planet, noting Coupland's affinity for cataloging youthful attitudes, hip theories, and witticisms.

An extensive collection of hair-care products was one of the ways in which Bret Easton Ellis indicated Patrick Bateman's psychosis in American Psycho, his shocker of two years ago. In Douglas Coupland's second novel, Shampoo Planet, it acts as an index of a different sort of psychosis: the rapturous self-absorption of its narrator, Tyler, in his own consumer cosmos. “Which shampoo shall I use today?” he asks himself, on waking up each morning. “Maybe PsycoPath O the sports shampoo with salon-grade microprotein packed in a manly black injection-moulded plastic motor-oil cannister … ”, and so on through a shelf of similarly ominous sounding products.

Like the brand names with which it chooses to papier-maché together its portrait of...