SOURCE: Review of Shampoo Planet, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 239, No. 27, June 15, 1992, p. 82.

In the following review, Steinberg exposes Shampoo Planet's “road-novel roots.”

Just a year after the cult success of his Generation X, with its tales of 20-somethings, Coupland takes on the vid-kids one dance-step younger. With hair-care perfection and spot-on irony, Tyler Johnson, this book's [Shampoo Planet] narrator, emerges from his hippie mom's two divorces and his hometown circle of friends to wander Europe (“I'm overdosing on history here”). But once he's safely back home and with his steady girlfriend Anna-Louise, his Euro-fling babe Stephanie shows up and unleashes a wanderlust he thought he'd filed away. Tyler, whose entrepreneurial goals are tidy as his hair, finds himself on the road, seeing the motor lodge vistas of his own land (“Convenience stores—the economic engine of the New Order”), and finally landing in his “personal Dark Ages...