The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Channel Zero by Michael Krekorian
Brooke Horvath

Michael Krekorian. Channel Zero. Plover Press, 1996. 121 pp. $17.95.

“Mockingbirds,” notes Michael Krekorian, “repeat the white noise of the urban environment.” So call Krekorian a mockingbird who’s singing just for you in a novel as complex as the internet yet brief as a word from our sponsor. If Zero Coupon, “hero” of Channel Zero, is not that sponsor, he works for him/it—as adman, photographer of cheeseburgers strump-dilly-icious as centerfold cheesecake, purveyor of country-fried iguana, the P. T. Barnum of rain forest as theme park, and the one who knows what he sees at the scene of each crime: those “big electro-echo fast lane, on-line one liners” whose tribal name in the global village is “average Americans.”

Channel Zero is the evening news gone haywire, a VH-1 video of life as early buyout in the midst of a hostile takeover. Call this virtual realism. Or change the channel and call it a systems novel (one that shows how individual lives are entangled in the larger systems of science, mass media, and the like). Owing something to Don DeLillo’s White Noise (“IBM, Coca-Cola, Sony,” one character chants; “Porche, McDonalds, and Disney”), Channel Zero is similarly fascinated by a world in which surface seems all the depth we possess, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and behind which surface the real sealers of our fate bark, a world in which characters are “free market holograms,” and where appropriation, distraction, manipulation, irreverence, and amnesia are what’s for sale. It is a “new age” wherein parents “cannot teach their own children anything,” people “wear their products on their sleeve,” and “the prevailing look, it will be natural.”

Channel Zero does its necessary knife-work through a series of (seemingly) loosely connected chapters, each a series of (seemingly) loosely connected paragraphs, each of which is in turn a sequence of (seemingly) loosely . . . : “Win one thousand dollars. Funny things are better two thirds of the time. Youth: a pleasant pastime. Are credit cards out of hand? Call the White House.” Such prose can prove wearing, and some readers, not all of them named Martini, will find themselves “shaken but not stirred.” Others will be appropriately ambivalent, uncertain about what it is they hear in Krekorian’s paternosters to nylon, his Maalox mantras, his just-wanna-be-like-you jeremiads. To them, this: “Do not wait for Zero Coupon to explain.” [Brooke Horvath]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Channel Zero by Michael Krekorian Brooke Horvath Michael Krekorian. Channel Zero. Plover Press, 1996. 121 pp. $17.95. “Mockingbirds,” notes Michael Krekorian, “repeat the white noise of the urban environment.” So call Krekorian a mockingbird who’s singing just for you in a novel as complex as the internet yet brief as a word from our sponsor. If Zero Coupon, “hero” of Channel Zero, is not that sponsor, he works for him/it—as adman, photographer of cheeseburgers strump-dilly-icious as centerfold cheesecake, purveyor of country-fried iguana, the P. T. Barnum of rain forest as theme park, and the one who knows what he sees at the scene of each crime: those “big electro-echo fast lane, on-line one liners” whose tribal name in the global village is “average Americans.” Channel Zero is the evening news gone haywire, a VH-1 video of life as early buyout in the midst of a hostile takeover. Call this virtual realism. Or change the channel and call it a systems novel (one that shows how individual lives are entangled in the larger systems of science, mass media, and the like). Owing something to Don DeLillo’s White Noise (“IBM, Coca-Cola, Sony,” one character chants; “Porche, McDonalds, and Disney”), Channel Zero is similarly fascinated by a world in which surface seems all the depth we possess, possession is nine-tenths of the law, and behind which surface the real sealers of our fate bark, a world in which characters are “free market holograms,” and where appropriation, distraction, manipulation, irreverence, and amnesia are what’s for sale. It is a “new age” wherein parents “cannot teach their own children anything,” people “wear their products on their sleeve,” and “the prevailing look, it will be natural.” Channel Zero does its necessary knife-work through a series of (seemingly) loosely connected chapters, each a series of (seemingly) loosely connected paragraphs, each of which is in turn a sequence of (seemingly) loosely . . . : “Win one thousand dollars. Funny things are better two thirds of the time. Youth: a pleasant pastime. Are credit cards out of hand? Call the White House.” Such prose can prove wearing, and some readers, not all of them named Martini, will find themselves “shaken but not stirred.” Others will be appropriately ambivalent, uncertain about what it is they hear in Krekorian’s paternosters to nylon, his Maalox mantras, his just-wanna-be-like-you jeremiads. To them, this: “Do not wait for Zero Coupon to explain.” [Brooke Horvath]

Search the full text of our books: