Shampoo Planet

There’s a reason the cover of Shampoo Planet looks like a Benetton ad: Generation X author Douglas Coupland has watched too much MTV, gulped too much diet Coke, and swallowed too many myths about young men capturing the voice of a generation in brand name- saturated coming-of-age novels. His new one stars a 20-year-old mall- crawler-a facetious, Reagan-era son of a hippie-who finds and loses love as he bumbles his way toward his goal, a corporate job. Neither political enough to be satiric nor substantial enough to be stirring, Shampoo Planet is strictly Pert Plus fare.