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 the twenty-something generation, Coupland's fiction battles in a crowded marketplace. His first novel, Generation X, published last year, had difficulty standing out, not just from thematically similar works such as the films Slacker and Singles—with which it got rounded up in lifestyle features—but against previous portraits of youthful ennui: the blank generation, the nul generation, Bret Easton Ellis's LA deadbeats, or the generation before that, the original Generation X. What made Coupland think his were so different, so appealing?

As a defensive tactic in his second novel, he has opted, somewhat rashly, for in-built obsolescence. Shampoo Planet bitchily declares Generation X to be “dead” and moves on to what it calls “Global Teens”. The taxonomic bluster is misleading, for this is a more successful attempt to map out essentially the same sensibility.

Unlike the rich New Yorkers at the centre of 1980s bratpack fiction, Tyler and his family are lower middle class and live in the Canadian sticks. Though in their early twenties, he and his sister still live at home. Children of the Reagan era, they can barely remember John Lennon's assassination, and they know who he was only thanks to their divorced mother, Jasmine. A former earth mother of the 1960s, Jasmine is the butt of the novel's tartly humorous opening scenes, in which the children whisk “dinner knives blackened from hash hot-knifing from the sight of friends”, or intone “Earth to mother” whenever she starts to reminisce at the breakfast table. A typical setting for Coupland's plot might have come straight from a television sitcom: an old girlfriend of Tyler's past comes to visit, causing ructions with his present girlfriend, Anne-Louise, a flight to LA and an eventual reconciliation.

Generation X started life as a lifestyle guide, a genesis which showed in its rag-bag format: a collection of statistics and byte-sized aperçus studding a largely irrelevant narrative. In Shampoo Planet, Coupland has taken more care to dramatize his youthful attitudinizing, but only slightly. As in soap operas, scenes last only as long as the supply of witticisms. The book is in fact at its least strained when following the line of least resistence, devolving into a bundle of hip, slick theories, mottos and brand-name checks.

It is here that the success of a novel like this lies. Coupland certainly has an eye for the ersatz sentimentality of much contemporary youth culture. Generation X concluded with its protagonists surrounded by a crowd of adulatory spastic children; ends with a flock of spaniel puppies, licking Tyler's face. Images of babies and childhood fleck the book, and its cover apes the feel-good globalism of Benetton’s advertising campaigns. But the pressure of speaking for his generation sends Coupland off into bluff. His writing often has the air of making finer social distinctions than it is actually capable of. Tyler disdainfully notes “beatific Santa Barbara Jesus teens with velcro neon money belts”, which will get a laugh only from those who don't know that Coupland is winging it. Does he speak for a generation? Not really; Shampoo Planet speaks more of its own desire to speak for a generation than anything else, which is a different sort of blankness from the one advertised.