Channel Zero

Set in Oklahoma City, this wan debut tries hard but fails to make readers understand or care about its dreary characters. Charlie Rivers spends most of his time drinking beer at Lucky's and working on cars with his childhood friend Tony Marducci, a violent racist. Charlie befriends Adam, a local five-year-old whose dad worries that Charlie is a bum or pervert. Meanwhile, Charlie wants kids of his own, but his peevish wife, Linda, a Korean-African American, doesn't. When Linda impulsively sleeps with young William, a cliche-spouting ""artist"" she meets at Lucky's, events head toward an anticlimax and a messy end. After Linda learns she is pregnant, she finds comfort from the novel's most interesting character, a nameless one-armed waitress at Lucky's. As with the main players, however, her possibilities remain unexplored. Despite some appealingly bleak dialogue and compellingly reductive situations, the narrative narrows down to a set of featureless souls lost in an equally empty landscape. (Dec.)